Meningiomas currently are among the most frequent intracranial tumours. Although the majority of meningiomas can be cured by surgical resection, ∼20% of patients have an aggressive clinical course with tumour recurrence or progressive disease, resulting in substantial morbidity and increased mortality of affected patients. During the past 3 years, exciting new data have been published that provide insights into the molecular background of meningiomas and link sites of tumour development with characteristic histopathological and molecular features, opening a new road to novel and promising treatment options for aggressive meningiomas. A growing number of the newly discovered recurrent mutations have been linked to a particular clinicopathological phenotype. Moreover, the updated WHO classification of brain tumours published in 2016 has incorporated some of these molecular findings, setting the stage for the improvement of future therapeutic efforts through the integration of essential molecular findings. Finally, an additional potential classification of meningiomas based on methylation profiling has been launched, which provides clues in the assessment of individual risk of meningioma recurrence. All of these developments are creating new prospects for effective molecularly driven diagnosis and therapy of meningiomas.

脑膜瘤目前是最常见的颅内肿瘤之一。虽然大多数的脑膜瘤可以通过手术切除治愈， 〜20％的患者患有侵袭性的临床病程，患有肿瘤复发或进行性疾病，从而导致高发病率和患病患者的死亡率增加。在过去的三年中，已经发布了令人兴奋的新数据，这些数据提供了对脑膜瘤的分子背景以及具有特征性组织病理学和分子特征的肿瘤发展部位的联系的见解，为侵略性脑膜瘤的新颖和有希望的治疗选择开辟了一条新道路。越来越多的新发现的复发突变与特定的临床病理表型有关。此外，2016年发布的更新的WHO脑肿瘤分类将这些分子发现纳入其中，通过整合必要的分子发现，为改善未来的治疗工作奠定了基础。最后，基于甲基化分析的脑膜瘤的另一种潜在分类已经被启动，这为评估个体脑膜瘤复发的风险提供了线索。所有这些发展为有效的分子驱动的脑膜瘤诊断和治疗创造了新的前景。