The number of cases where we see brain tumors in children is rare, and brain tumors are uncommon in children, occurring in only five out of every 100,000. Brain tumors in the early stages of childhood are malignant, or they can be called noncancerous, but in very rare cases, these tumors turn out to be cancerous.
Cancerous or noncancerous both forms can be fatal. Despite this, children with brain tumors have a better prognosis than adults with the same illness.
New Tests To Identify Brain Tumor
The brain is the organ in the human body of which medical science is not completely aware. In the case of a tumor in the brain, there are not many options present with the experts, and ultimately the case may get fail.
However, a team of specialists has recently come up with a new technique with the help of which it can be easy to find the tumor and go for the treatment options.
This method is simple yet highly effective and offers results with great accuracy, said one of the team members that carried out the study of tumors and their detection in the brain.
Each year, around 2,200 children and adolescents in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor. The vast majority of children and adolescents who develop brain tumors live into adulthood. Many patients, however, will suffer physical, psychological, social, and intellectual issues as a result of their therapy.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and BC Cancer, working in collaboration with the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute (BCCHR), have developed a novel test to help doctors detect medulloblastoma, the most common malignant childhood brain tumor.
The test, which can identify between highly high-risk normal and malignant instances that require radiation therapy and those that do not, might open the way for individualized treatment choices for children with cancer.
According to the researchers, only sophisticated and expensive tests performed in a few numbers of labs across the country can now identify youngsters with the most severe types of the disease, which develops in the cerebellum, the central region of the brain.
Due to existing testing limitations, all children with medulloblastoma undergo the same sort of therapy, exposing children with less severe forms to harmful side effects of brain radio and chemotherapies, sometimes resulting in persistent learning, physical, and emotional problems. Meanwhile, children with the most severe types of the condition may not receive therapies that are effective enough to cure them.
The new test, developed in Dr. Poul Sorensen’s laboratory at the BC Cancer Research Institute, is based on immunohistochemistry, an antibody-based approach that is extensively used in clinical laboratories throughout the world.
The researchers created the test by analyzing a variety of data sets, including proteomics (which evaluates total protein expression in tumor tissues) and transcriptomics (which measures overall gene expression in tumor tissues). Using this method, scientists discovered TPD52, a protein that is significantly expressed in the most aggressive medulloblastoma.
They next examined the expression of this protein in 400 medulloblastoma samples and discovered that tumors with this protein were substantially more likely to exhibit aggressive activity and relapse.
“These days, research is helping in putting forward new methods which are making treatment available for all and the identification simpler,” Dr. Delaidelli notes. “One of the most common ways of doing research is by using a little reverse engineering,’ working backward by analyzing extremely complex data sets to design a procedure that can be executed in almost all clinical labs throughout the world.”
Research is still going on in this field, and we can expect much better results and techniques as the research continues.
