What Are Brain Tumors?

 What Are Brain Tumors?

onto the topic at hand and I would like to just spend a few minutes putting putting this into a context in terms of what our brain tumors and how common are they and in fact what we are talking about with primary brain tumors meaning those kinds of tumors that arise from brain tissue not tumors that spread to the brain from elsewhere there are many different types and in fact the World Health Organization ization which classifies brain tumors classifies over 126 of them we're not going to speak about all of them today but each of them has a distinct biology and therapy and gliomas are the most common of the primary brain tumors and there are about 17,000 new people diagnosed each year with a malignant glioma and just to put that in a context there are about a hundred and eighty thousand people in the United States diagnosed each year with breast cancer so you can see it's a much less common disease than many of the other cancers you're aware of gliomas get their name from the fact that they come from a type of cell.

the brain called a glial cell and this is not a nerve cell so it's not the cells that you really think about when you think about the brain and the word glia means glue in the greek and actually these are the cells that hold the brain together literally and help connect the nerve cells to each other it is the main cell in the brain and there are two predominant types called astrocytes and oligodendroglioma that now the cause of brain tumors is for the most part unknown there are only a few risk factors that have ever been identified as potentially leading to a brain tumor and the main one is that of prior radiation therapy so some people may have received radiation therapy to the head or neck region for another purpose perhaps years before and then that will increase their risk of a subsequent brain tumor there are other things that have been described in the literature such as head trauma or petroleum exposure a sparked a more NutraSweet but all of these things have really been inconclusive and the relationship with a brain tumor if any is really very weak cell phones in my opinion do not cause brain tumors I use a cell phone the data are not convincing at all and very rarely are brain tumors part of a genetic syndrome now the brain is a particularly challenging organ of the body to have a tumor it is not a homogeneous organ the way the lung or the liver or even the colon is so you could take out the left lung and you can completely survive with the right lung.

it doesn't compromise in any way your ability to get oxygen but in the brain that's not true and symptoms from a brain tumor are related not just to the size of the tumor but most importantly to the tumor location and this becomes a big issue from a therapeutic point of view as well so the brain is a compartmentalized organ and one of the problems that we face is that healthy parts of the brain cannot necessarily assume the function of a part of the brain that is sick or not working well so unlike the left lung that can take over and expand even a bit to accommodate loss of a right lung the right side of the brain can not necessarily take over when the left side of the brain is compromised and this can be particularly challenging when thinking about treatment and I know dr. guten is going to get into this so when we come to surgery so this is just a picture of a normal human brain you see all these squiggles they all look the same right you can't really tell one squiggle from the other but in fact they are extreme different now unfortunately this brain is now facing a different way this is the front the eyes this is the back and these color-coded areas designate some of the different or main functions that that we have so the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body this red strip is the motor function meaning your ability to voluntarily move your arm and leg on the opposite side.

the blue strip control sensation and for example this purple area in the back here controls vision and so when we have someone with a brain tumor and this is an MRI kind of in the same plane as that picture here a brain tumor in this area you can imagine that this person's vision is going to be affected but their sensory and motor function is not going to be affected so this the the kinds of symptoms that you have are all related to where in the brain the tumor occurs and that might be as you talk among yourselves you realize that some of you may have very different kinds of experiences than others this is another MRI picture this is a typical kind of a picture this is a normal brain and this is a brain with from someone who has a glioblastoma and you see that it is here and look this is actually the right side of the brain and this white area outlines the predominant site of the disease now as good as imaging is diagnosis can only be established by a pathologist and this requires a surgical procedure of some sort a biopsy or resection etc and the point I just want to make here is that pathology is in interpretation and actually the pathology report is usually a description and then the pathologist gives his interpretation meaning how they view the entire picture that they're looking at and then they draw conclusions and make a diagnosis that so pathology is not an absolute it's not like measuring the blood sugar level where everybody would agree yes the blood sugar is 100 and this is sometimes cause for discrepancy in pathology interpretation where one doctor says one thing and another doctor says another thing and I think that's probably one of the things that is hardest for non professionals to really understand it requires a lot of expertise for a correct diagnosis and these tumors are particularly challenging because they can be mixed they they can have a low grade and a high grade component and they can have different cell types involved so sometimes it's truly in the eye of the beholder and we along with really everybody in throughout the world use.

the World Health Organization classification and I'm not going to get into the details of this but just to say that they are fundamentally divided into two groups low grade and high grade I personally do not like the word benign because I don't really view these as completely benign tumors and this can be grade one or most of them are grade two and you can have low grade astrocytomas low grade oligodendroglioma and then you can have higher grade versions of the same thing and they are into two categories grade 3 and grade 4 both of which are high grade and they have these names anaplastic astrocytoma anaplastic oligodendroglioma and the glioblastoma the word anaplastic really just means malignant so just in conclusion brain tumors are really quite rare in comparison to other cancers the cause is completely unknown in the vast majority of people really fewer than 5 percent do.

we ever have a clear identifiable risk factor or trigger symptoms are related to the location of the brain in which the tumor occurs and also to the speed of growth of the tumor and to the ultimate size that is present at the time you the person comes to medical attention and that malignant gliomas in potato killer are challenging to diagnose and also to treat we're going to spend time on treatment and that expertise and really multidisciplinary collaboration is needed to do the best job.Brain Tumour Causes, Symptoms & Treatment -Q&A COMPLETE INFORMATION