Kourosh Askari - MD, Pathology Department of Razi Hospital, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran
Sara Janeshin - Student Research Committee, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran
Mehryar Mashouf - MD, Department of Neurosurgery, Arya Hospital, Rasht, Iran
Maryam Taherzadeh-Amlashi - Specialist in internal medicine, Rasht, Iran

Background: Tumors of the central nervous system (CNS) are a heterogeneousgroup of neoplasms with different prevalence in different sex and age groupsand various parts of CNS.Objectives: Determining the relative frequency of different types of CNStumors in different ages, sex and CNS anatomical locations.Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was performed usingpathological reports of CNS tumors from patients in three main referralneurosurgical hospitals in Guilan, Iran from 1999 to 2009, which provided thefollowing demographical data: patient age at the time of hospital admission,gender, histological diagnosis and the anatomical location of tumors.Results: From a total of 365 cases, 292 were brain tumors (80%) and theremaining 20% were diagnosed as spinal tumors. There were 27 different typesof CNS tumors in the present study, with astrocytomas (28.5%) andmeningiomas (27.1%) being the most common types among brain tumors andschwannomas (35.1%) being the most common among spinal cord tumors.Frontal lobe (17.5%) was the most common anatomical location for braintumors, and thoracic region was the most common region affected by spinalcord tumors (41.1%). Metastatic or secondary tumors accounted for 3.8% of theCNS tumors in our study. Contrary to most other studies, the frequency of CNStumors was higher in females than males and was most frequent in the 5thdecade of life.Conclusions: This study demonstrated the high frequency of CNS tumors withastrocytic origin. The most common tumor was astrocytoma, with meningiomabeing the second most prominent one.

Spinal Cord; Neoplasms