Skip to Content. Use the menu to see other pages. This section explains the types of treatments that are the standard of care for a brain tumor. When making treatment plan decisions, you are encouraged to consider clinical trials as an option. A clinical trial is a research study that tests a new approach to treatment. Doctors want to learn whether the new treatment is safe, effective, and possibly better than the standard treatment.
Clinical trials can test a new drug, a new combination of standard treatments, or new doses of standard drugs or other treatments. Clinical trials are an option to consider for treatment and care for all types of brain tumors. Your doctor can help you consider all your treatment options. Learn more about clinical trials in the About Clinical Trials and Latest Research sections of this guide. This is called a multidisciplinary team. Your care team may include a variety of other health care professionals, such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners, oncology nurses, social workers, pharmacists, counselors, dietitians, rehabilitation specialists, and others.
It is important to have a care team that specializes in caring for people with a brain tumor, which may mean talking with medical professionals beyond your local area to help with diagnosis and treatment planning. The common types of treatments used for a brain tumor are described below. Your care plan may also include treatment for symptoms and side effects, an important part of your medical care. Some types of brain tumors grow rapidly; other tumors grow slowly.
Considering all these factors, your doctor will talk with you about how soon treatment should start after diagnosis. Treatment options include those described below, such as surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy. For a low-grade brain tumor, surgery may be the only treatment needed, especially if all of the tumor can be removed. If there is visible tumor remaining after surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy may be used. For higher-grade tumors, treatment usually begins with surgery, followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy.
Your exact treatment plan will be developed with your health care team. Successfully treating brain tumors can be challenging. However, this barrier also keeps out many types of chemotherapy.
Surgery can be difficult if the tumor is near a delicate part of the brain or spinal cord. Even when the surgeon can completely remove the original tumor, parts of the tumor may remain that are too small to be seen or removed during surgery. Radiation therapy can also damage healthy tissue. However, research in the past 20 years has helped to significantly lengthen the lives and improved the quality of life for many people with a brain tumor. These advancements include more refined surgeries, a better understanding of which types of tumors respond to chemotherapy and other drugs, and more targeted delivery of radiation therapy.
Take time to learn about all of your treatment options and be sure to ask questions about things that are unclear. Talk with your doctor about the goals of each treatment and what you can expect while receiving the treatment. Shared decision-making is particularly important for a brain tumor because there are different treatment options.
Learn more about making treatment decisions. A brain tumor and its treatment cause physical symptoms and side effects, as well as emotional, social, and financial effects. Managing all of these effects is called palliative care or supportive care. It is an important part of your care that is included along with treatments intended to slow, stop, or eliminate the tumor.
Palliative care focuses on improving how you feel during treatment by managing symptoms and supporting patients and their families with other, non-medical needs. Any person, regardless of age or type and stage of tumor, may receive this type of care. And it often works best when it is started right after a brain tumor diagnosis. People who receive palliative care along with treatment for the tumor often have less severe symptoms, better quality of life, and report that they are more satisfied with treatment.
Palliative treatments vary widely and often include medication, nutritional changes, relaxation techniques, emotional and spiritual support, and other therapies. You may also receive palliative treatments similar to those meant to get rid of the tumor, such as chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation therapy.
Some of the symptoms of a brain tumor can be severe and have an enormous impact on the daily lives of patients and their family caregivers. However, many symptoms can often be managed with the use of certain medications.
Supportive care for people with a brain tumor includes:. These drugs are used to lower swelling in the brain, which can lessen headache pain from the swelling without the need for prescription pain medications. These drugs may also help improve neurological symptoms by decreasing the pressure from the tumor and swelling in the healthy brain tissue.
Anti-seizure medicines. These help control seizures, and there are several types of drugs available. These medications are prescribed by your neurologist. Before treatment begins, talk with your doctor about the goals of each treatment being recommended in the treatment plan. You should also talk about the possible side effects of the specific treatment plan and palliative care options. Many patients also benefit from talking with a social worker and participating in support groups.
Ask your doctor about these resources, too. During treatment, your health care team may ask you to answer questions about your symptoms and side effects and to describe each problem. Be sure to tell the health care team if you are experiencing a problem. This helps the health care team treat any symptoms and side effects as quickly as possible. It can also help prevent more serious problems in the future. Learn more about the importance of tracking side effects in another part of this guide.
Learn more about palliative care in a separate section of this website. Surgery is the removal of the tumor and some surrounding healthy tissue during an operation. It is usually the first treatment used for a brain tumor.
It is often the only treatment needed for a low-grade brain tumor. Removing the tumor can improve neurological symptoms, provide tissue for diagnosis and genetic analysis, help make other brain tumor treatments more effective, and, in many instances, improve the prognosis of a person with a brain tumor.
A neurosurgeon is a doctor who specializes in surgery on the brain and spinal column. Surgery to the brain requires the removal of part of the skull, a procedure called a craniotomy. After the surgeon removes the tumor, the patient's own bone will be used to cover the opening in the skull. There have been rapid advances in surgery for brain tumors, including the use of cortical mapping, enhanced imaging, and fluorescent dyes.
Cortical mapping allows doctors to identify areas of the brain that control the senses, language, and motor skills. Enhanced imaging devices give surgeons more tools to plan and perform surgery. For example, computer-based techniques, such as image guided surgery IGS , help surgeons map out the location of the tumor very accurately.
However, this is a very specialized technique that may not be widely available. A fluorescent dye, called 5-aminolevulinic acid, can be given by mouth the morning before surgery. This dye is taken up by tumor cells.
Doctors can use a special microscope and light to see the cells that have taken up the dye during the surgery. This helps doctors safely remove as much of the tumor as possible. Typically, the patient is awakened once the surface of the brain is exposed.
Then, special electrical stimulation techniques are used to locate the specific part of the brain that controls speech. This approach can help avoid causing damage while removing the tumor. In addition to removing or reducing the size of the brain tumor, surgery can provide a tissue sample for an analysis using a biopsy see Diagnosis.
For some tumor types, the results of the biopsy can help determine if cancer medications or radiation therapy will be useful. For a cancerous tumor, even if it cannot be cured, removing it can relieve symptoms from the tumor pressing on the brain. Sometimes, surgery cannot be performed because the tumor is located in a place the surgeon cannot reach or it is near a vital structure.
These tumors are called inoperable or unresectable. If the tumor is inoperable, the doctor will recommend other treatment options that may also include a biopsy or removal of a portion of the tumor. Before surgery, talk with your health care team about the possible side effects from the specific surgery you will have. Learn more about the basics of surgery. Radiation therapy is the use of high-energy x-rays or other particles to destroy tumor cells.
Doctors may use radiation therapy to slow or stop the growth of a brain tumor. It is typically given after surgery and possibly along with chemotherapy. A doctor who specializes in giving radiation therapy to treat a tumor is called a radiation oncologist. The most common type of radiation treatment is called external-beam radiation therapy, which is radiation given from a machine outside the body.
When radiation treatment is given using implants, it is called internal radiation therapy or brachytherapy. A radiation therapy regimen, or schedule, usually consists of a specific number of treatments given over a set period of time. Conventional radiation therapy. The treatment location is determined based on anatomic landmarks and x-rays. In certain situations, such as whole-brain radiation therapy for brain metastases, this technique is appropriate.
For more precise targeting, different techniques are needed. Using images from CT and MRI scans see Diagnosis , a 3-dimensional model of the tumor and healthy tissue surrounding the tumor is created on a computer.
This model can be used to aim the radiation beams directly at the tumor, sparing the healthy tissue from high doses of radiation therapy. Intensity modulated radiation therapy IMRT. It can deliver higher doses of radiation to the tumor while giving less to the surrounding healthy tissue.
In IMRT, the radiation beams are broken up into smaller beams and the intensity of each of these smaller beams can be changed. Non-small cell lung cancer has a higher survival rate at all stages as compared with small-cell lung cancer, and both have poor prognoses when diagnosed at later stages.
While chemotherapy is less targeted than radiotherapy, treatment for inoperable lung cancer can include both of these treatments at the same time.
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For certain lung cancers, a doctor may recommend robotic assisted thoracic surgery RATS. Despite the available options, brain tumors still can impact the physical and emotional well-being of both the patient suffering from the brain tumor and their loved ones, nonetheless. There are methods of dealing with the physical, emotional, and social influences that brain cancer can have and is called palliative care or supportive care.
In addition to treatment, these forms of care are valuable in helping to treat and reduce the brain cancer tumor. Palliative care is focused on the improvement of how a patient feels during their treatment by controlling symptoms and supporting patients and their family members with other demands that are non-medical.
Those individuals who reach palliative care have symptoms that are less severe, maintain a better quality of life, and are more satisfied overall with their treatment. Palliative treatments can be different depending upon the situation, but usually involve the use of some type of medication, changes in diet and nutrition, methods of relaxation, support in the form of emotional and spiritual well-being, as well as other therapies.
Palliative treatment is aimed at assisting in getting rid of the tumor, similar to how chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation therapy would help.
At Immunity Therapy Center, we focus on an integrative treatment to make sure we help you through every step of the way, both physically and emotionally. A holistic treatment ensures an individualized treatment that you deserve because your cancer and how your body reacts will be unique to you.
Systemic therapy is a type of therapy that uses medication in order to kill tumor cells. The most common methods to give systemic therapies include an intravenous IV tube that is administered into a vein using a needle or into a pill or capsule that can be swallowed.
The systemic therapies used to fight cancer cells include those of chemotherapy or targeted therapy. A treatment plan may be put together to include radiation therapy with or without the inclusion of something further. It is important to discuss the best methods of noninvasive options for treating an inoperable brain tumor with a healthcare provider.
A healthcare provider must know all prescription, over-the-counter medications, or supplements that an individual with brain cancer is taking because herbs, supplements, and other drugs have the likeliness of interacting with whatever medications may be offered for a brain tumor. This treatment is beneficial in that it blocks the growth and spreading of tumor cells to surrounding tissue and attempts to limit the damage of healthy cells.
Whatever treatment options that you may decide on for the treatment of your inoperable tumor, know that the Immunity Therapy Center is available for your treatment and support needs. He opened Immunity Therapy Center in with the goal of providing the highest quality medical care for more than 5, patients. At Immunity Therapy Center, our goal is to provide objective, updated, and research-based information on all health-related topics. All information has been fact-checked and reviewed by Dr.
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