Updated perspectives on awake neurosurgery with cognitive and emotional assessment for patients with low-grade gliomas
Résumé
Introduction: Thanks to early extensive surgical resection combined with medical oncological therapies, life expectancy dramatically increased in low-grade glioma (LGG), with an overall survival currently over the past fifteen years. Therefore, patients should be able to maintain valuable family and socio-professional activities.
Areas covered: For many decades, cognitive and emotional aspects were neglected by surgical and medical neurooncologists. The goal of surgery was to avoid hemiplegia and/or aphasia, with no considerations regarding behavior. However, because LGG patients live longer, they must be cognitively and affectively able to make long-term projects. Preservation of higher-order functions should be considered systematically in LGG surgery by means of awake cognitive/emotional mapping and monitoring.
Expert opinion: The aim is to incorporate recent advances in neurosciences, which proposed revisited models of cerebral processing relying on a meta-network perspective, into the pre-, intra- and post-operative procedure. In this connectomal approach, brain functions result from complex interactions within and between neural networks. This improved understanding of a constant instability of the neural system allows a better cognitive/emotional assessment before and after each treatment over years, in order to preserve personality and adaptive behavior for each LGG patient, based on his/her own definition of quality of life. It is time to create oncological neurosciences.