neoplastic causes of spinal cord and cauda equina compression in adults: pathological and statistical features

this presentation analyses the histological types, relative incidences, age, sex and anatomical distributions of one hundred and seventy-nine biopsy proven tumors of the spinal canal from a general hospital in iran. particular attention is paid to differences in the relative incidence of these tumors compared with that in various published reports and the statistics from several eastern countries are compared with those from the west. in the patients studied, secondary tumors were the most frequent causes of spinal cord and cauda equina compression (39.6%), followed by nerve sheath cell tumors (24.5%), meningiomas (20%) and neuroepithelial tumors (10%). among the secondary tumors, the most common metastatic tumor was the lymphoma and the most common vertebral column neoplasm was the myeloma, each accounting for 8.9% of the entire series, an unusually high proportion for the myeloma.