http://www.donlinlong.com/diagnosticcenter/tarlovcysts.html a Paragraph from the above Link from Dr Long
The history of Tarlov cysts is quite interesting. Tarlov first thought they did not cause symptoms, but by the 1950’s he had identified patients with these cysts who could be cured by surgery, and other surgeons began to report the same kinds of patients successfully treated by surgery. Over the next 50 years or so, there have been a number of reports of individual patients and small groups of patients benefited significantly by surgical repair of symptomatic cysts. For reasons which are unclear from the literature, the mythology has grown up over the past 20 years that these cysts never cause symptoms. There is no paper which I can find published in the medical literature which supports this statement. However, two generations of physicians have been taught that these cysts do not cause symptoms and radiologists often make the statement that the cysts do not cause symptoms in their reports without any knowledge of the individual patient. How this all came about in the absence of any papers supporting the position is uncertain. It is true that many cysts occur in patients without symptoms. However, it is equally true that some cysts are symptomatic, injure nerves, and can cause serious neurological deficits with time. The key issue is to determine when the cysts are symptomatic and when they are not. It is the experience from many reports that some of these cysts are symptomatic and can be successfully treated. These cysts occur most frequently in women,7-9 to 1.