Chemotherapy for meningiomas

Abstract

The most efficacious treatment for meningiomas is surgery. For incompletely resected or recurrent tumors, radiotherapy can be given. However, when the meningioma is unresectable and/or all other previous treatments have failed, immunotherapy or chemotherapy may be considered for malignant tumors and immunotherapy and hormone therapy may be considered for benign ones. Various chemotherapy treatments that have shown some efficacy in individual cases include combinations of Adriamycin and Dacarbazine or Ifosfamide and Mesna. The most effective immunotherapy appears to be administration of interferon-alpha, which is relatively non-toxic and easily tolerated. However, more studies are needed to better define the roles of these agents in the management of a recurrent, unresectable, or malignant meningiomas.