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.”
According to Gephart, there are a few different factors that doctors consider when grading a brain tumors, “the way that we grade them has to do with how quickly the cells are dividing, what cell we think is misbehaving, and then how abnormal do those do those cells look? In addition, we’ve incorporated a lot of new genetic modeling of these tumors in order to know, even if the tumor looks very similar underneath the microscope, it may have invoked different pathways in order to continue to grow, and those treatments can differ depending upon those results.”
Brain tumor classification, Dr. Gephart tells us, has to do with where the tumor began, “So one of the main differences between tumors that migrate to the brain and tumors that originate from the brain itself has a lot to do with how the tumors travel in the brain. Sometimes tumors can grow and create a ball that actually pushes normal brain away, or tumors can grow over the surface of the brain. Malignant tumors that originate in the brain tend to infiltrate into the normal brain, meaning that I think of it almost as if you have a battle between good guys and bad guys, and you have clear battlefronts on malignant tumors that have clear margins between tumor versus normal brain.”
On the other hand, “malignant brain tumors that start in the brain don’t work like that. They’re more like spies. So they infiltrate through the normal brain, and you’ll have a normal brain cell right next to a tumor cell,” says Dr. Gephart.
It 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.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
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.”
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According to Gephart, there are a few different factors that doctors consider when grading a brain tumors, “the way that we grade them has to do with how quickly the cells are dividing, what cell we think is misbehaving, and then how abnormal do those do those cells look? In addition, we’ve incorporated a lot of new genetic modeling of these tumors in order to know, even if the tumor looks very similar underneath the microscope, it may have invoked different pathways in order to continue to grow, and those treatments can differ depending upon those results.”
Brain tumor classification, Dr. Gephart tells us, has to do with where the tumor began, “So one of the main differences between tumors that migrate to the brain and tumors that originate from the brain itself has a lot to do with how the tumors travel in the brain. Sometimes tumors can grow and create a ball that actually pushes normal brain away, or tumors can grow over the surface of the brain. Malignant tumors that originate in the brain tend to infiltrate into the normal brain, meaning that I think of it almost as if you have a battle between good guys and bad guys, and you have clear battlefronts on malignant tumors that have clear margins between tumor versus normal brain.”
On the other hand, “malignant brain tumors that start in the brain don’t work like that. They’re more like spies. So they infiltrate through the normal brain, and you’ll have a normal brain cell right next to a tumor cell,” says Dr. Gephart.
It 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.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
