Lay Summary Vestibular schwannomas are non-cancerous tumors that grow near the nerves involved in hearing and balance, and focused radiation treatments such as Gamma Knife radiosurgery are commonly used to control them. The authors of this study wanted to determine whether tumor size before treatment could help predict how well tumors respond to Gamma Knife radiosurgery over time. To do this, they studied 928 patients treated with radiosurgery and compared tumor size, tumor classification, and radiation planning measurements with the risk of tumor growth after treatment. They found that larger tumors were more likely to grow after treatment, but no single measurement reliably predicted which tumors would recur when multiple factors were analyzed together.
Wang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.