ABSTRACT
In 1973, John Kepes brought to the attention of the neurooncology community a set of tumors whose morphology closely resembled a lipid-laden sarcoma (Kepes et al., 1973). The unusual feature of a subset of these radiographically well-circumscribed tumors was their prolonged clinical history that was typically well controlled by surgical resection alone. In 1979, with the advent of the immunohistochemical detection of glial fibrillary acidic protein, these tumors surprisingly yielded a vital secret, an astrocytic lineage (Kepes et al., 1979). These superficial tumors, invested with a pericellular wrapping of reticulin, were termed pleomorphic xanthoastrocytomas (PXA).
