Common clinical symptoms of early glioma

  With the development of modern imaging techniques, the diagnosis of glioma has become relatively easy, but not all of them are conscious for an ordinary person to go to the hospital for examination. In clinical practice, many patients with glioma often come to the hospital only when the tumor is already large in size, and when they trace their medical history, the symptoms have often been present for a long time until they become very obvious or unbearable. Many foreign scholars are surprised by the size of gliomas in Chinese patients and believe that the average size of gliomas in Chinese patients is larger than in their countries. This is the gap of our medical system and the lack of national knowledge of medical science. Therefore, I would like to use this article to let more people understand the early clinical manifestations of glioma so that they can get early and better diagnosis and treatment.  1. Headache: About 30% of patients with glioma show headache, and about 70% of them have headache that gradually worsens. Most of these headaches are not specific, but are intermittent, mostly located on the same side of the lesion, and are mostly dull pains rather than throbbing pains, sometimes not easily distinguished from tension headaches. Gliomas in the brain usually present as pain in the forehead, while gliomas in the cerebellum tend to present as pain in the occipital and neck areas. If the tumor is too large and produces high cranial pressure, the headache is significantly worse, sometimes waking up with pain during sleep and significantly worse with vigorous head movements, sometimes accompanied by nausea and vomiting. If the intracranial hypertension lasts for a long time, there will also be the manifestation of vision loss.  2. Seizures: About one-third of patients with glioma exhibit seizures, and the incidence increases to 50-70% during the progression of the disease. Half of these seizures are limited seizures, while the other half are generalized seizures. Slow-growing low-grade gliomas are particularly likely to cause seizures, whereas glioblastomas are less likely to cause seizures. Oligodendrogliomas cause about 75-95% of seizures, astrocytomas about 65-70%, and glioblastomas about 37-50%. The prognosis of high-grade gliomas with seizures tends to be better than that of those without seizures. In addition to generalized grand mal seizures, seizures caused by different parts of the tumor often have their own characteristics: for example, frontal lobe glioma can cause seizure convulsions and aphasia in the opposite limb; medial temporal lobe tumor is associated with phantom smell, seizure fear, and shortness of breath; and parietal lobe tumor can cause partial sensory disorder, etc.  3. Mental changes: About 15-20% of glioma patients have mental status changes as the first symptom, mainly manifested as changes in mood, personality, cognitive function, calculation and memory.  4.Focal neurological symptoms: Different locations of tumors can also cause corresponding neurological deficit symptoms, such as paralysis of limbs, sensory impairment, aphasia, unstable gait, hemianopia, loss of reading and writing, and other symptoms.  5. Cranial nerve symptoms: Damage to different cranial nerves can produce corresponding neurological symptoms, such as vision loss, diplopia, eye strabismus and facial palsy.  Overall, glioma can manifest as all symptoms of neurological diseases, but not all symptoms will appear in a particular person, and these early symptoms will vary with the type of tumor, tissue characteristics, and the site and rate of growth. Here although I am presenting to you the early clinical symptoms of glioma, in fact these symptoms are also suitable for many other kinds of brain tumors. To let you know the symptoms of these tumors is not to inform you to pay attention to your feelings every day, but to remind you that if you have obvious symptoms, it is better to go to the hospital early!