Background: Atypical and anaplastic meningiomas tend to recur and to invade adjacent brain, bone, and skin. They can also metastasize to extracranial organs such as the lung, liver, or bone causing death. The classic genetic abnormality is loss in chromosome 22. Recent reports have indicated that allelic deletion of chromosome 1p is associated with malignant progression of meningiomas.
Methods: Cytogenetic analysis of 4 meningiomas was performed using double target fluorescent in situ hybridization and focusing on chromosomes 1 and 22. The meningioma series included 4 patients whose tumors were histologically benign.
Results: One patient's tumor had recurred. FISH was performed on 500 nuclei/tumors. All our cases showed a loss of chromosome 22q while only 1 meningioma showed an additional loss of chromosome 1p, and this was the recurred one.
Conclusions: The results of this study support the existence of tumor suppressor gene(s) on 1p associated with recurrence in meningiomas and suggest that status of chromosome 1p by FISH may assist physicians in predicting prognosis of patients affected by this tumor. However more in-vestigation is needed in this direction, as our re-sults refer to a small number of subjects studied.