Intracranial intraparenchymal schwannomas: a series of eight cases.

Intraparenchymal schwannomas of the CNS are extremely rare. Between 1979 and 1993 400 cases of intracranial schwannomas were operated on and among them were eight patients with intraparenchymal schwannomas comprising 2% of intracranial benign nerve sheath tumours. Four of them were located in the cerebral hemispheres and two each in the brain stem and in the cerebellum. In two cases, there was associated neurofibromatosis (NF-1 and NF-2, one case each). The age ranged from 6 months to 45 years with a male/female ratio of 3:1 and, surprisingly, six of them were in the left cerebral or cerebellar hemisphere.