• Francesca Gabriela Paslaru, Anca Maria Panaitescu, Elena Nestian, George Iancu, Alina Veduta, Alexandru Catalin Paslaru, Lucian Gheorghe Pop, and Radu Mircea Gorgan.
• Neurosurgical Department, Bagdasar-Arseni Clinical Emergency Hospital, 041915 Bucharest, Romania.
• Medicina (Kaunas). 2022 Jan 14; 58 (1).

AbstractHeadache is a common complaint during pregnancy and the puerperium. The differentiation between a benign headache and a headache that has an underlying more endangering cause, such as an intracranial tumor, can be difficult and often requires diagnostic procedures and brain imaging techniques. We report the case of an 18-year-old female patient who developed clinical symptoms-persistent headache followed by neurological deficit-in the last part of her pregnancy. A medulloblastoma (MB) was diagnosed and treated after delivery. We review 11 other cases of MB in pregnancy reported in the literature. The most common clinical manifestation at diagnosis was headache followed by neurological deficits. We discuss the association of brain tumor growth with physiological changes during pregnancy. We conclude that clinical features of intracranial tumors can be misinterpreted as pregnancy-related symptoms and should not be dismissed.

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