Active clinical trials for "Neuroma, Acoustic"

Vestibular schwannomas (VS) arise from the vestibulocochlear (hearing and balance) nerve, located at the base of the brain. Although benign, VS can enlarge over time, resulting in debilitating symptoms; therefore, surgical removal is frequently offered. One significant risk of surgery is inadvertent injury to the facial nerve, which lies adjacent to the vestibulocochlear nerve. Currently, the nerve's course is only revealed during surgical dissection and injury can cause permanent facial weakness. It would therefore be useful for the surgeon to know the course of the nerve before operating. To this end, a new MRI technique known as probabilistic diffusion tensor tractography (DTT) has shown potential in revealing the course of the facial nerve pre-operatively. However, its clinical reliability remains uncertain. This study aims to investigate the reliability of DTT in identifying the course of the facial nerve preoperatively in patients undergoing surgery for VS. The future benefit would be to enable surgeons to operate with more confidence and potentially reduce the chance of nerve injury. The study will recruit adult patients due to have surgery for VS. The only change to the participants' clinical pathways will be the addition of a DTT sequence to their pre-operative MRI scans (increasing scanning time by approximately 10 minutes).

This project will investigate the role of noise in the vestibular system, and in particular its effects on the variability (precision) of vestibular-mediated behaviors. The investigators will study vestibular precision in normal subjects and patients with peripheral vestibular damage, and will investigate its potential plasticity. The goals are to develop a better understanding of the role noise plays in the vestibular system in normal and pathologic populations, and to determine if the brain can learn to improve signal recognition within its inherently noisy neural environment, which would result in improved behavioral precision.

This is a study of the feasibility of activating the auditory system by an electrode in direct contact with the cochlear nerve.

Vestibular schwannomas are benign lesions of the ponto-cerebellar angle that are potentially dangerous because of their growth in a cramped space and the compressive phenomena they can cause. Stereotactic Gammaknife radiosurgery is a treatment option that can be offered for evolutive schwannomas smaller than 2.5-3 cm in size. It allows tumor stabilisation in 85% of cases with less than 1% facial nerve damage risk. There are controversial results regarding hearing preservation : percentages vary between 25 and 80% in the literature, depending on the criteria used and the post-treatment delay. Few studies have investigated changes in vestibular function and the impact on balance of radiosurgery, and their results are variable. These controversial results lead us to comprehensively assess the vestibular function and balance of these patients using a balance-specific quality of life questionnaire, in addition to objective overall vestibular assessments of vestibular function.

The study is a pilot efficacy study. The investigators aim to estimate mean baseline and post-treatment balance scores among Vestibular Schwannomas (VS) patients undergoing pretreatment rehab (PREHAB) or no PREHAB when managed with either surgery or radiosurgery.

In standard of care regularly planned surgery, tissue will be obtained from patients who are suspicious for having vestibular Schwannoma (on MRI). The tissue that remains after the pathologist gathered sufficient for analysis, the remaining tissue is used for creating tumour stem cell organoids.

Subjects with Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF2) and progressive vestibular schwannoma (VS) will be treated with crizotinib administered orally. Crizotinib will be taken continuously until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity, in continuous treatment cycles of 28 days each, for a maximum of 12 cycles.

A recent study by Plotkin et al. showed that bevacizumab (Avastin) treatment was followed by clinically meaningful hearing improvement, tumor-volume reduction, or both in some, but not all, patients with Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) who were at risk for complete hearing loss or brain-stem compression from growing VS. Because of the promising results in preliminary studies of Bevacizumab and because of significant experience with the safety of the dosages proposed in this study, this study will offer a safe treatment for patients with VS. Therefore, this phase I clinical research trial will test the hypothesis that Bevacizumab can be safely used by direct intracranial superselective intraarterial infusion up to a dose of 10mg/kg to ultimately enhance survival and hearing function of patients with VS.

Multiple sensory cues are typically generated by discrete events, and while they do not reach the cerebrum simultaneously, the brain can bind them temporally if they are interpreted as corresponding to a single event. The temporal binding of vestibular and non-vestibular sensory cues is poorly understood and has not been studied in detail, despite the fact that the vestibular system operates in an inherently multimodal environment. In this study, the researchers are investigating the physiology and pathophysiology of vestibular temporal binding by studying normal subjects, patients with peripheral and central vestibular dysfunction, and patients with vestibular and cochlear signals provided by prosthetic implants in the inner ear.

Vestibular schwannomas are primarily benign (WHO grade I) tumors originating from the Schwann cells of the vestibular nerve and are among the most common tumors of the skull base. Common treatment options are surgical tumor resection or targeted radiation therapy. The special challenge of surgical treatment is the functional preservation of the cranial nerves, especially the cochlear and facial nerves. Perioperative ischemia of the cochlea and cochlear nerve is postulated as the underlying mechanism of postoperative hearing loss. Ischemic preconditioning is a non-invasive procedure that triggers the release of vasoactive cytokines and mediators by repeated short-term induction of limb ischemia. Improved perfusion of critically perfused end organs as well as a reduction of cerebral infarct volumes has already been shown in other pathologies. In the planned study, possible neuroprotective effects of remote ischemic preconditioning on postoperative hearing as well as facial nerve function in patients with vestibular schwannomas will be examined.