The relationship between cortical injury and brain tumour. Report of two cases and review of the literature.

We report on two cases of brain tumour and discuss the possible relationship to previous cortical trauma. The first patient, a 67-year-old male patient developed a glioblastoma at the same site of an open shell-splinter injury of the brain after a latency of 48 years. The second patient, a 55-year-old male, had a malignant anaplastic astrocytoma in the right frontal lobe 10 years after clipping of an aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery. Both cases fulfill the criteria of Zülch [52] for the correlation between cortical trauma and tumour. We believe that the development of a brain tumour following a cortical injury is very rare, although possible. Probably the brain must display some form of predisposing genetic alteration for a tumour to develop following a cortical injury.