Conventional management of asymptomatic patients with low-grade gliomas is conservative because there is no evidence that early treatment with either surgery or radiotherapy confers any survival advantage or prevents subsequent malignant transformation. Many neurologists rely on yearly contrast-enhanced scans to detect tumour progression. However this approach may not be sensitive to the earliest changes of transformation. We are currently setting up a research project to examine this. Neurological Complications of Cancer Information Neurological complications of cancer are common, increasing and disabling.
Diagnosis is often difficult and treatments are usually effective.
There is a particular interest in diagnosing and treating patients with paraneoplastic neurological syndromes, which are rare but important neurological conditions associated with the presence of a small, often undiagnosed, cancer elsewhere in the body. Although rare they are important because they direct the clinician to search for a potentially treatable underlying cancer and because they themselves cause significant morbidity and even mortality. The frequency of these disorders in the United Kingdom is not known and so we have started a nationwide survey through the British Neurological Surveillance Unit to estimate the disease burden in this country. Occasionally treatment of the underlying cancer, if identified, helps the neurological disorder. It is therefore of crucial importance to identify a small occult tumour as soon as the diagnosis is suspected.