Treating Brain Tumors in Children

FROM THE HEALTH GUIDE:

Of all the different kinds of solid tumors that a child might get, the brain tumor is the most common one. What causes brain tumors in children?

As with any other kind of tumor, a brain tumor comes about when a cell somehow gets out of control and multiplies uncontrollably. For the most part, science doesn’t yet have an answer to what causes brain tumors in children exactly. But scientists do suspect genetic reasons and environmental influences.

When a pediatrician suspects a brain tumor in a child, the first thing he does is to order an MRI or CT scan. A child needs be very still for any one of these scanning devices to work properly. Most of the time, with very young children, the doctor sedates the child so that she’ll stay still enough. Sometimes, if the results of the scan don’t seem conclusive enough enough, they’ll even try to do a biopsy – where they actually take out material from the brain.

It can take a whole team of specialists to successfully treat brain tumors in children. Most of the time, a child who is affected in this way will need surgery, chemotherapy and even radiation therapy. Treatment techniques have improved considerably now. Most of the time, the child will come out in one piece.

But it can be a very complicated process treating brain tumors in children. Typically, the team of doctors treating the child will include a neurosurgeon, a neurologist, a pediatric radiation therapist, a neuro-oncologist who specializes in children and so on.

Medical science is now clear about how brain tumors in children should be treated – it should be treated aggressively. And so, pediatric neurosurgeons are usually able to produce better outcomes – now that they know what exactly they need to do. The fact that there is all this high-tech equipment that they have at their disposal, helps too.

These days, they usually conduct pediatric brain tumor surgery in stages. They don’t go in and remove the tumor all at once. They do it a little bit at a time, over several operations. When they do it this way, they are able to make use of intervening periods to apply radiation therapy to the tumor so that it will shrink. The doctors hope that when they do this, they can be as non-invasive is possible. The third new techniques coming online all the time.

Instead of using radiation traditional radiation, the doctors use something called proton beam therapy.

In the future, all brain tumors in children will be treated this way. Proton beam radiation is a far more precise a way of going about it. There is no collateral damage to tissue that’s close to the tumor.

www.thehealthguide.org/tumors/treating-brain-tumors-in-children/