Dr. Maya Lodish, pediatric endocrinologist National Institute of Child Health and Human Development National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD Survivors of childhood brain tumors are at an especially high risk for damage to the endocrine system. The endocrine system is comprised of glands and hormones that help to control specific functions of the body, such …
Eric Raabe MD, PhD One of the goals of pediatric cancer treatment is deploying personalized medicine. Treating each patient and each tumor, with exactly the right type of therapy to maximize killing of tumor cells and minimize side effects to patients is the objective. Initially, brain tumors were classified by their appearance under the microscope. …
Africa Fernandez, Ph.D., Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center first year funding, 2010 – 2011 Medulloblastomas are brain tumors arising in the cerebellum, and they are the most common kind of solid tumor of childhood. Current treatments for these tumors leave patients with life-long damage, since the treatments affect the still-developing brain. Identifying therapies that attack the …
Nothing is more frightening than to learn that your child has a brain tumor. These serious tumors are unfortunately all too common; in fact, malignant brain tumors are the most frequent type of solid cancer seen in childhood. To make matters more difficult, conventional radiation therapy – a mainstay of treatment for adults – cannot …
Dr. Jack Su, Pediatric Hematology-Oncology, Texas Children’s Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine When I first chose pediatric oncology for my fellowship, invariably I was asked the question “Why would you want to take care of children with cancer?” Now that my career has evolved to working with children with brain tumors, I am still …
Ichiro Nakano, M.D., Ph.D., Clinical Instructor / Assistant Professor, Departments of Neurosurgery, Pediatrics, and Psychiatry, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA 2008 Despite the dramatic improvements in the outcome of other childhood cancers in the last decades, brain tumors remain the leading cause of death in the pediatric oncology. Malignant brain tumors are composed …
Ideally, when a child is diagnosed with a brain tumor, a multidisciplinary group of providers (neurosurgeons, neuropathologists, neuro-radiologists, neuro-oncologists, etc.) cooperate to determine the optimal treatment. Many factors influence the decision. Central to considerations are the classification, grading, and staging of pediatric brain tumors. With the exception of only a few tumor types and locations, …
