A Remarkable Feat, Singing During Brain Cancer Surgery
- A woman, 24, diagnosed with astrocytoma, a rare type of brain tumor, had to be awake for part of brain surgery to remove the baseball-sized tumor. She sang a song reciting all 50 states she remembered from elementary school to keep herself engaged.
- Astrocytoma brain tumors develop from astrocytes, which are “star-shaped cells” found in the brain. The American Brain Tumor Association describes these types of tumors as “slow growing and tend to invade surrounding tissue.”
- The astrocytoma Jayden Zientara was diagnosed with was at least grade 2, but an official confirmation will come once the tumor is fully tested. At grade 2, there’s a chance astrocytoma may progress into a glioblastoma brain tumor, according to research published in the National Library of Medicine.
- Glioblastoma brain tumors are cancerous and “grow and spread very quickly,” according to the National Cancer Institute. The average survival rate is 15 months with treatment and less than six if left untreated.
- Symptoms often associated with glioblastoma may include seizures, headaches, changes in speech, and difficulty balancing.
- Surgery often cannot remove all the glioblastoma because of the way the tumor burrows into the brain. However, treatment options exist for glioblastoma, offering much-needed hope, such as tumor-treating fields (TTFields), which use low-intensity electric fields, making it harder for cancer cells to flourish.
A woman, 24, diagnosed with brain cancer stunned her doctors as she managed to sing a song reciting all 50 states during brain surgery.
“It’s a song I’ve known since I was young,” Jayden Zientara told Fox News Digital.
“After I received the CT, they told me I had a brain mass and needed to get transferred to Vanderbilt for an MRI,” Jayden Zientara said.
She was diagnosed with astrocytoma, a rare type of brain tumor that was slightly smaller than the size of a baseball. Astrocytoma brain tumors develop from astrocytes, which are “star-shaped cells” found in the brain. The American Brain Tumor Association describes these types of tumors as “slow growing and tend to invade surrounding tissue.” This is a type of glial tumor and makes up “60 percent of the tumors,” according to research published in StatPearls.
Jayden’s mom said they know the brain tumor is at least a grade 2. According to research published in the National Library of Medicine, grade 2 astrocytoma is usually seen in adults and “may progress to glioblastoma.”
While undergoing a 12-hour brain surgery to remove the cancerous tumor, Jayden had to be awake for part of the procedure because her brain needed to be stimulated. Doctors asked her what or who she could talk about to keep her awake, and aside from discussing her brother and sports, she managed to recall a memorable song from her childhood.
“I also told them I could list all 50 states in alphabetical order. It’s a song I’ve known since I was young. I learned it in elementary school, and I’ve never forgotten it,” she said.
Jayden’s musical rendition was recorded for her to reflect on while preparing for the next stage in her cancer journey. She will undergo chemotherapy and radiation, but not before Jayden preserves her eggs so she can have children in the future.
Last month, Jayden’s mom said chemo and radiation were delayed because “Jayden decided she is going to freeze some eggs. For those of you who may not know, chemo has a high likelihood of causing infertility issues. The hope and goal are that Jayden beats this cancer and returns to normal life and future! When that day comes, she wants the option to be there for her to have children.”
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Cancer Treatment’s Impact on Fertility in Women
Cancer treatments such as chemotherapy can destroy eggs in your ovaries, making it impossible or difficult to get pregnant later. Whether or not chemotherapy makes you infertile depends on the type of drug and your age since your egg supply decreases with age.
“The risk is greater the older you are,” reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Jaime Knopman told SurvivorNet.
WATCH: Chemotherapy’s effect on fertility.
“If you’re 39 and you get chemo that’s toxic to the ovaries, it’s most likely to make you menopausal. But, if you’re 29, your ovaries may recover because they have a higher baseline supply,” Dr. Knopman continued.
Radiation to the pelvis can also destroy eggs. It can damage the uterus, too. Surgery to your ovaries or uterus can hurt fertility as well.
Meanwhile, endocrine or hormone therapy may block or suppress key fertility hormones and may prevent a woman from getting pregnant. This infertility may be temporary or permanent, depending on the type and length of treatment.
If you are having a treatment that includes infertility as a possible side effect, your doctor won’t be able to tell you for sure whether you will have this side effect. That’s why you should discuss your options for fertility preservation before starting treatment.
Research shows that women who have fertility preserved before breast cancer treatment are more than twice as likely to give birth after treatment than those who don’t take fertility-preserving measures.
Most women who preserve their fertility before cancer treatment do so by freezing their eggs or embryos.
After you finish your cancer treatment, a doctor who specializes in reproductive medicine can implant one or more embryos in your uterus or the uterus of a surrogate with the hope that it will result in pregnancy.
If you freeze eggs only before treatment, a fertility specialist can use sperm and your eggs to create embryos in vitro and transfer them to your uterus.
When freezing eggs or embryos is not an option, doctors may try these approaches:
- Ovarian tissue freezing is an experimental approach for girls who haven’t yet reached puberty and don’t have mature eggs or for women who must begin treatment right away and don’t have time to harvest eggs.
- Ovarian suppression prevents the eggs from maturing so they cannot be damaged during treatment.
- Ovarian transposition, for women getting radiation to the pelvis, moves the ovaries out of the line of treatment.
In addition to preserving eggs or embryos, positive research has shown that women with early-stage hormone-receptor (HR) positive breast cancer were able to safely pause endocrine therapy (ET) to try to get pregnant, and they did not have worse short-term recurrence rates than people who did not stop endocrine therapy.
What Are the Treatment Options for Glioblastoma?
Although glioblastomas are challenging to treat, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of temozolomide (Temodar) was a massive breakthrough in helping patients with this aggressive disease.
Temozolomide is a chemotherapy drug patients can take after surgery and radiation. During radiation treatment, doctors use high-energy beams such as X-rays to target and kill cancer cells.
WATCH: Glioblastoma treatment options.
Dr. Daniel Wahl, professor of radiation and oncology at the University of Michigan, explains Temozolomide is an oral drug that ” slows down tumor growth.”
“Patients with GBM have effective treatment options; there are four of them: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and tumor targeting fields. These are electric fields that we can use to treat these cancers,” Dr. Wahl said.
Other FDA-approved drugs created to treat glioblastoma include lomustine (brand name Gleostine), intravenous carmustine (brand name Bicnu), carmustine wafer implants, and Avastin (brand name bevacizumab).
Avastin is a targeted drug therapy that blocks glioblastoma cells from requesting new blood vessels that feed and allow the tumor to grow.
“Outcomes for these patients are still suboptimal. What I tell my patients is that we have these effective treatments, but what they do is they delay the time to when this tumor comes back. Only in exceptional circumstances would we ever talk about getting rid of one of these cancers a few,” Dr. Wahl said.
Fortunately, research is ongoing to improve the prognosis for people battling glioblastoma. One area of promise is tumor-treating fields, which can help extend patients’ lives by two years on average, giving them hope.
Optune, the brand name for the tumor-treating fields delivery device, was launched in 2011 and approved by the FDA in 2015. It is a wearable and portable device for glioblastoma treatment for adult patients aged 22 years or older.
“There’s been a very exciting development of tumor treating fields, which are electrical fields that have been applied to the brain,” Dr. Suriya Jeyapalan, a neurologist at Tufts Medical Center, previously told Survivor Net.
TTFields use low-intensity electric fields to disrupt the cell division process, making it harder for cancerous cells to multiply.
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