Walsh & Hoyt: Lipomas

Although neither the brain nor the meninges normally contain adipose tissue, lipomas may occur intracranially or within the spinal canal. These tumors are extremely rare. Vonderahe and Niemer found only 4 examples among 5,000 routine postmortem examinations (0.08%), a figure that is similar to the incidence of intracranial lipomas identified among 17,500 patients examined by CT scanning during a 4-year period at the university clinics in Munich, Mainz, and Berlin (0.06%). Budka found 9 intracranial lipomas during 1,956 selected autopsies in patients with neurologic disease (0.46%), a rate similar to that found by Kazner et al., who identified 11 cases among 3,200 patients with brain tumors (0.34%).