The SurvivorNet community is filled with pride after learning about Madi White, a Davenport Iowa student who is making school and her passion for welding central to her life, even after her stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis. She told WQAD8 that "People are telling me (school’s) not the most important thing right now but to me I want to keep it as the most important thing," all while making her daily trip to Iowa City for treatment.
We don’t know the details of Madi’s case, but we do know that brain cancer differs in some major ways from cancers in other parts of the body, “the way that brain tumors are graded is very different than the way that tumors are graded in other parts of the body,” says Dr. Melanie Hayden Gephart, a brain tumor neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center. “For the most part, tumors that originate from brain cells themselves don’t travel to other parts of the body. That’s quite different than other types of cancer, like breast cancer and lung cancer, that do have the potential to travel to other organs, including to the brain.”
Read MoreIt terms of identifying brain tumors, “There are some brain tumors, like a meningioma, that are very characteristic on MRI scan. And sometimes we recommend surgery or focal radiation, just based on the MRI scan alone.
MRI Scans can be an important part of diagnosis for a lot of different types of cancer. We’ve talked a lot with Dr. Geoffrey Sonn, a Urologist at Stanford Medical Center, about the utility of MRI Scans, and the importance of getting good MRI information.
But again, the brain is a unique beast, “There are a lot of great challenges, though, when it comes to imaging the brain because still, for the vast majority of tumors within the brain, we need a tissue diagnosis. And the reason is is because the imaging is inadequate to be able to confidently tell us exactly what type of tumor it is.”
In this case, more steps are required to identify the tumor, “So, we use something that’s called a tractography, and that helps us in our surgical planning. And the reason why that’s important is because we know which regions of the brain, based on anatomy and also on functional MRI scans, are responsible for particular types of movements or speech, and that is relatively well-defined. But the hard part is that, when you have a tumor and the tumor displaces the normal connections that the brain has between the, the neurons, that is much more challenging to discern,” says Dr. Gephart.
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