A 30-year-old man presented with recurrent headaches. CT head revealed a clival chordoma (figure 1A). Chordomas originate from the embryonic remnants of the notochord and account for 2%–4% of all malignant bone tumors. They have a predilection for the axial skeleton, with 35% affecting the spheno-occipital region. The incidence peaks at ages 20–40 years. Male patients are affected twice Figure ...

Chordomas are locally aggressive malignant tumors of notochordal origin whose metastatic potential is increasingly recognized. Surgical pathway recurrence has been noted only rarely in the literature. We present three patients with clival chordomas whose sole or initial recurrence was along the pathway of prior surgical access. A characteristic mass found along the pathway of prior surgical acc...

Intracranial chordomas are typically clival and extradural in location, yet these tumors can obviously invade the dura. However, primary intradural chordomas without local extension is a rare event with approximately 47 cases reported in literature. Furthermore, all intradural chordoma reports appear to be extraventricular in location.[1,2] In addition, through advances in technology and optics...

A 28-year-old woman presented with left-sided frontotemporal headache lasting 6 wk. Head CT and MR imaging revealed a clival mass, which was interpreted as a chondrosarcoma. The lesion was removed at endoscopic endonasal surgery; histologic and immunohistochemical findings proved it to be neurenteric cyst. On CT scans, the lesion was lytic, with an intact cortex; it was uniformly hyperintense r...