Meningioma and mood: exploring the potential for meningioma to affect psychological distress before and after surgical removal

Abstract

Background: Much of the research exploring psychological distress with meningioma stem from studies including several brain tumour types (including malignant tumours) meaning that focus on meningioma is limited and that conclusions are based on small samples. Moreover, contradictory findings have been reported regarding the effects of meningioma on mood. Here, the authors present a study exploring pre and post mood scores in meningioma only patients using a sample size larger than any previous research attempt.

Method: The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) was used as an objective measure of mood in a clinical sample of 184 UK patients pre and post meningioma removal surgery. Repeated measures designs were used to assess for significant differences in depression and anxiety scores before and after surgery, chi-squared analyses were used to establish for clinically significant change.

Results: The study revealed a significant decrease, and a medium effect size, in mean depression scores after surgery to remove the meningioma (p = .002, g = 0.35). However, no significant effect was found following meningioma removal and anxiety scores (p = .113, g = 0.17).

Discussion: No significant effects were determined between mood and meningioma location. A discussion of the findings, and potential implications, is presented.

Keywords:

• Meningioma
• mood
• anxiety
• depression
• surgery

Disclosure statement

One of the authors, Nitin Mukerji, is an associate editor for the British Journal of Neurosurgery, Otherwise, the authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest concerning this research article.

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. For this type of study formal consent is not required.

Data statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, TW. The data are not publicly available due to [restrictions e.g. their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants].

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Professor Philip Kane, Mr Anil Varma, Dr Geoffrey Hill, Dr Jenna Moffitt, Mr Craig Robson, and Dr Jason Price of The James Cook University Hospital for all of their support during the completion of this research.