How much tissue surgeons remove may affect whether a meningioma comes back
Original title: Simpson Grading and Risk of Recurrence in 4074 Meningioma Patients With Gross Total Resection.
How far along is this research?
- Lab cells
- Animals
- Review
- Tested in people
This was tested in people. That is the most reliable kind of research we share.
This looked back at records from people who already had surgery, and it does not test a new treatment.
The short version
Removing more of the tissue around a meningioma was linked to a lower chance of it growing back.
What was studied. Doctors looked at records from 4074 people who had a meningioma fully removed by surgery. The data came from 42 hospitals around the world. They checked if a common surgery scoring system, called Simpson grading, predicted which tumors came back.
What they found. The Simpson score measures how much of the tumor's lining and nearby bone was removed. People with higher scores had a higher risk of the tumor coming back, for grade 1 and grade 2 tumors. In grade 1 tumors, a Simpson score of 2 meant more than twice the chance of return at 5 years, compared with a score of 1. The link was clear for tumors on the outer surface of the brain and at the skull base. It mattered much less for tumors in the middle groove between the two halves of the brain.
What this means, and what it doesn't
What it could mean: Removing the tissue and bone around a meningioma still seems to matter. This may help your doctor judge your own risk of the tumor coming back. But the tumor's type and where it sits also matter a lot.
What it doesn't mean: This study looked back at past surgeries. It did not test a new treatment. It does not mean every surgery should remove more tissue, since some tumor spots make that harder. It is not a cure, and it does not change care on its own.
Source: PubMed, September 21, 2026 · Read the original
This plain-language summary was written by AI and published automatically after passing our automatic safety checks. How we write.