Brain cancer facts

Brain cancer facts

* Brain cancer can arise from many different types of brain cells (primary brain cancer) or occur when cancer cells from another part of the body spread (metastasize) to the brain.


* Causes of brain cancer are difficult to prove; avoiding compounds linked to cancer production is advised.


* Symptoms of brain cancer vary but often include weakness, difficulty walking, seizures, and headaches. Other common symptoms are nausea, vomiting, blurry vision, or a change in a person's alertness, mental capacity, memory, speech, or personality.


* Tests for brain cancer involve a history, physical exam, and usually a CT or MRI brain scan; sometimes a brain tissue biopsy is done.


* Treatments usually are directed by a team of doctors and are designed for the individual patient; treatments may include surgery, radiotherapy, or chemotherapy, often in combination.


* Side effects of treatments range from mild to severe, and patients need to discuss plans with their treatment team members to clearly understand potential side effects and their prognosis (outcomes).


* Depending on the brain cancer type and overall health status of the patient, brain cancer frequently has only a fair to poor prognosis; children have a somewhat better prognosis.

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Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

On Jan. 21, 1993, the television talk-show host Larry King featured an unexpected guest on his program. It was the evening after Inauguration Day in Washington, and the television audience tuned in expecting political commentary. But King turned, instead, to a young man from Florida, David Reynard, who had filed a tort claim against the cellphone manufacturer NEC and the carrier GTE Mobilnet, claiming that radiation from their phones caused or accelerated the growth of a brain tumor in his wife.
“The tumor was exactly in the pattern of the antenna,” Reynard told King. In 1989, Susan Elen Reynard, then 31, was told she had a malignant astrocytoma, a brain cancer that occurs in about 6,000 adults in America each year. To David Reynard, the shape and size of Susan’s tumor — a hazy line swerving from the left side of her midbrain to the hindbrain — uncannily resembled a malignant shadow of the phone (but tumors, like clouds, can assume the shapes of our imaginations). Suzy, as she was known, held her phone at precisely that angle against her left ear, her husband said. Reynard underwent surgery for her cancer but to little effect. She died in 1992, just short of her 34th birthday. David was convinced that high doses of radiation from the cellphone was the cause.

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