Early clinical symptoms of glioma

  1. Headache: About 30% of patients with glioma present with headache, and about 70% of them have progressively worse headache. Most of these headaches are non-specific, only intermittent, mostly located on the same side of the lesion, and mostly present as dull pain rather than throbbing pain, sometimes not easily distinguished from tension headache. 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: The location of the tumor can also cause corresponding neurological deficit symptoms, such as paralysis of limbs, sensory impairment, aphasia, gait instability, hemianopia, loss of reading and writing, etc.  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 tell you to pay attention to your feelings every day and think whether you are suffering from brain tumor or not, if so, you will not be able to live and work, but to remind you that if you have obvious symptoms, it is better to go to hospital early.