- Basic
- Symptoms
- Diagnosis
- Treatments
What is Brain Cancer?
Brain cancer is a neoplasm growing in cranial cavity, which is also called intracranial tumor. Brain cancer include malignant tumors growing in various cells of brain itself, cranial nerves, meninges, skull, pituitary gland and other metastatic brain tumors.
As there are all bones in cranial cavity, once tumor developed in brain, intracranial pressure will increase, causing headache, vomiting, blurred vision, spasm, coma and other symptoms, besides, location of lesions and pathological properties vary with age.
How Common Brain Tumor is and How High Its Mortality is?
Incidence of brain cancer nearly accounts for about 5% of all cancers, accounting for 70% of children’s cancers. Brain cancer can occur at any age, while it is with high incidence among people at the age of 20-40, the male and female ratio for brain cancer is 13:10.
Each year there are about 18,500 people diagnosed with brain cancer in the world, about 12,760 people die of brain cancer, and the average age of death is 64 years old, furthermore, the mortality of brain cancer is still increasing every year.
What’s Harm that Brain Cancer will Cause?
1. Brain tissues are damaged, causing neurological disorder, which then leads to loss of normal function of the body.
2. Occurrence of edema, causing swelling of brain, resulting in elevated intracranial pressure.
3. Edema results in serious injury of cranial cavity, causing death of central nervous system.
4. Olfactory disorder, motion becoming slowly, all limbs appearing fatigue and other discomforts can be caused.
What are the Risk Factors of Brain Cancer?
1. Radiation: radiation wave emitted by mobile phone and computer may promote cancerization of cells. Besides, exposure to radiation also can be a risk factor of brain cancer.
2. Trauma: external trauma stimulates brain, scar tissue of meninges, which can cause cancer, and brain trauma may accelerate growth of pre-existing brain tumor.
3. Chemical factors: brain cancer is related to long-term exposure to pesticides, dyes, formaldehyde.
4. Congenital factors: during embryonic development, ectopic primitive cells or tissues are left in the cranial cavity, which have function of differentiation and proliferation, resulting in congenital brain cancer.
5. Genetic factors: genetic defects or gene mutation can cause brain tumors and about half of patients have family history of brain cancer.
What are the Symptoms of Brain Cancer?
1. With headache at four or five o’clock in the morning, patients often wake up due to headache, with sleep deeper, headache more server.
2. Patients may vomit without being accompanied by nausea and abdominal pain, and with no relations with taking food, but spurting vomit after a period of headache.
3. Brain tumors can cause increase of cerebral pressure, leading to unsmooth circumfluence of ocular venous blood, which will result in stasis and edema and then visual cells in retina will be damaged, causing decreased vision.
4. One side of eyeball protrudes and in cases with severe symptoms, incomplete eyelid closure will be caused.
5. Because brain cancer stimulates temporal lobe in the lower region of brain tumor, olfactory hallucination can appear.
6. With compression to auditory nerve by brain tumor, hearing of one side of ear can gradually degrade.
7. With onset of seizures until adulthood, if there are no trauma and other factors, those patients’ conditions should be firstly considered as brain cancer.
How Brain Cancer are Diagnosed?
1. Skull x-ray: it helps to understand whether intracranial pressure increases or not, skull local damage of skull or hyperplasia, etc.
2. Brain CT scans: it is easy to detect size, shape, number, location, density and properties of lesions.
3. MRI: it can show the vast majority of brain tumors and peripheral edema of tumor, as well as the precise location, size and shape of tumor.
4. EEG examination: it can position fast growing brain tumor on cerebral hemisphere, which can show wave amplitude lowering and frequency slowing beside the brain tumor.
5. Biochemical determination: as for patient with pituitary tumor, especially those whose hormone secretion from anterior lobe of pituitary is excessive, blood biochemical examination can be done.
What are the Nursing and Care Methods for Brain Cancer?
Diet nursing
1. Eat more fresh vegetables and fruits.
2. Some proteins should be contained in the diet, such as egg white, fish and all kinds of bean products.
3. Eat less animal fat, including foods with high cholesterol such as lard, butter and cream, etc.
4. Avoid eating foods that will excite nervous system such as wine, strong tea and coffee.
Psychological Nursing
1. Do not resist regularly going to hospital for check.
2. Patients with brain cancer are prone to bring about negative psychology, so family members should often communicate with patients.
3. Family members should often give encouragement to patient with brain cancer, helping the patient to build confidence to fight cancer.
The best treatment for brain cancer
A multidisciplinary team composed of surgeons, pathologists, radiation cancer experts, minimally invasive oncologists, nurses for cancer nursing and interpreters carries out expert consultation according to symptoms and conditions of patients with cervical cancer and then gives treatment plans that are most applicable to the patient, in order to greatly improve the therapeutic effect of cervical cancer patient.
What are the Best Treatments for Brain Cancer?
A multidisciplinary team composed of surgeons, pathologists, radiation cancer experts, minimally invasive oncologists, nurses for cancer nursing and interpreters carries out expert consultation according to symptoms and conditions of patients with brain cancer and then gives treatment plans that are most applicable to the patient, in order to greatly improve the therapeutic effect of the patient.
Traditional Chinese Medicine in Treating Brain Cancer
Traditional Chinese medicine plays a role in adjusting systematic balance, reinforcing the healthy qi to fight against cancer, and improving immunity as well as building up health. Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou combines traditional Chinese medicine with other modern cancer treatment technology, thus the advantages of traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine are integrated so as to effectively improve the effect of cancer treatment.
What kinds of supports can be obtained?
Practice proves that the clinic team services composed by multiple disciplines like oncosurgery, oncology, pathology, imageology and anesthesia doctors as well as professional nurses, can provide patients with most effective, most suitable and most economic treatment plan, and also can greatly improve the therapeutic effect of treating cancer patients.
“One station” medical system constructed by Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou combining multiple disciplines, can perform comprehensive diagnosis and treatment for patients under the condition of without adding patients’ burden. Therefore, on one hand, it can provide all-round and heartfelt medical services, and on the other hand, it improves medical efficiency and level. There are many channels can be applied to conduct the communication between patients and doctors, like online consultation, email, telephone conversation, and face-to-face consultation. All these consultation services can effectively help patients to fight the cancer. While the medical team faced by the patients includes doctors, nurses, dietitians, interpreters and so on to meet various demands in different level of different countries. Patients would be more confident under the unobstructed communication environment to cooperate the hospital to diagnose and treat the diseases.
With another name of intracranial tumor, brain cancer actually includes the primary tumor originates from brain parenchyma and secondary brain cancer, the metastases from other parts of body. Its symptoms vary as individual condition changes. Specialist from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou would explain the causes and common symptoms of brain cancer.
What Cause Brain Cancer?
1. The radiation and electric waves from mobile phone and computer can promote the canceration of cells.
2. The occurrence of brain cancer is related to the contact of insecticide, solvent, dyes and formaldehyde according to studies. Additionally, a pregnant woman takes alcohol or hair dye before delivery would increase the risk for babies to develop neuroblastoma.
3.A tumor may develop in brain just because of environmental trauma irritating brain and scar tissues of brain. This traumatic tumor mostly occurs on a base of damages in cerebral dura mater and arachnoid. External injure of brain can stimulate the growth speed of existing brain cancer besides.
4. Radiation. The long-term exposure to radiation is another cause of brain cancer.
What Are the Common Symptoms of Brain Cancer?
1. Headache is one of the most obvious symptoms of brain cancer. It normally occurs in 4 or 5 am when the patients are in deep sleep. Patients often wake up due to headache, with sleep deeper, headache more server.. The headache disappears gradually at 8 or 9 o’clock after getting up.
2.Spraying vomiting. Compared to vomits that are caused by gastric diseases, the vomit occurs on brain cancer normally shows no symptoms like stomach stuffiness and distension, nausea and abdominal pain or diarrhea. Moreover, the vomit is not related to foodintake, it is just a sudden spraying vomit soon after headache, which is because of increased intracranial pressure stimulating the vomiting centre of medulla.
Besides, abrupt twitch, single exophthalmos, deafness in one ear, hemiplegia, lowered eye vision, diplopia, difficulty in swallow and sustaining body balance, dizziness, are also the symptoms of brain cancer.
Specialist from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou reminded that, brain cancer symptoms vary as per different individual condition, once any suspected symptoms occur, the patient should have related examinations and treatments in regular hospital in time.
In recent years, brain cancer has become one of the diseases threatening people's life and health. It brings severe painfulness and disturbance to people. Regular examination can help people discover brain cancer early while brain cancer diagnosis can help determine whether there is brain cancer or not, so as to improve the treatment effect of brain cancer. Below are diagnosis methods of brain cancer introduced by experts from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou.
What Are the Diagnostic Methods of Brain Cancer?
1. Examination of eye fundus
To observe whether there is papilledema in the eyeground. Papilledema is one of the three signs of intracranial hypertension, accompanied with headache and vomiting. It is seen in only one quarter of the brain cancer patients. Therefore, one can not hastily exclude the possibility of brain cancer only because the examination of fundus proves negative.
2.X-ray photographs of the skull
X-ray photographs of skull can reveal whether there are abnormalities like increase of intracranial pressure, local damage or hyperplasia of the skull, enlargement of the sella turcica, pineal calculus and pathologic calcification of brain tumor. They are helpful in determining the location and nature of the tumor, but only less than 1/3 of them prove positive. Therefore, one can not hastily exclude the possibility of brain cancer only because the X-ray photographs of skull prove negative.
3.EEG (electrocardiogram) examination
EGG is helpful in determining the location of the fast growing tumor in the cerebral hemisphere. It shows decrease of wave amplitude and slow down of frequency in area around the tumor but is less helpful in diagnosing tumors in brain midline and deep part of cerebral hemisphere, as well as meningeoma in infratentorial brain.
4.CT examination of brain
CT examination of brain can detect more than 90% of the brain tumors. As so far the main diagnosis method of brain cancer, it can reveal size, shape, amount, location, density and nature of the brain cancer.
5.MRI examination
It can reveal most of the brain tumors and their surrounding edema and precisely reveal the location, size and shape of brain tumor. MRI is an important additional examination method of CT examination.
Experts from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou remind that if one is diagnosed with brain cancer, he should go to regular hospital for treatment timely.
Brain cancer is a commonly-seen malignant tumor. Its morbidity and mortality is increasing year by year. To ensure good health, periodical physical examinations are required. Do not be caught up in panic once has been suffering from brain cancer, instead, active cooperation with doctors’ treatment is recommended to achieve effective control on brain cancer. Experts of Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou would like to introduce the following treatment methods for brain cancer:
What Are the Traditional Treatments for Brain Cancer?
1、Chemotherapy is a commonly-used method for all kinds of cancers, and brain cancer is not an exception. By now chemotherapy has achieved a great improvement in treating brain cancer, but due to special construction of blood-brain barrier, chemotherapy has been confined by many factors. Any drugs of chemotherapy can penetrate endangium cells due to liposolubility, and then enter and work on cancer cells. Such mode has influenced the speed and efficiency of drugs action.
2、Radiotherapy applies radioactive rays, γ-rays or high velocity neutron ray to treat cancer cells. Radiotherapy mainly adopts the characteristics that cancer cells are extreme sensitive to radioactive rays and can be easily damaged by these rays to perform treatments. The scale of radiation scope and dosage shall be defined as per tumor cancer pathologic diagnosis, differentiation degree and results of imageology examinations. For the in-depth brain tumor that cannot be safely cut, radiotherapy can be applied; however, the process of radiotherapy may cause relatively big toxic reaction or side effect.
3、Surgery is a direct method for treating brain cancer. For primary brain cancer, surgery can be applied to cut the tumor to maximally eliminate cancer cell thoroughly and avoid cellular proliferation after surgery to further prevent brain cancer recurrence. Such treatment is commonly used while the potential of recurrence after surgery is relatively high.
Minimally Invasive Therapy for Brain Cancer
Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou has introduced advanced cancer treatment facilities that feature many characteristics like minimally invasive, pain-free, quick recovery and so on. Tumor experts shall work out a series customized and suitable treatment plans for the brain cancer patients as per their different condition, symptoms through the way of expert team’s consultation.
Brain cancer experts of Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou are able to combine interventional therapy, Ar-He knife, TCM, radioactive particle, bio-immunotherapy and photodynamic knife with minimally invasive technologies together to treat brain cancer. This can not only avoid the shortcomings like poor therapeutic effect and big side effect that traditional therapies own, but also improve the therapeutic effects and living quality of brain cancer patients.
Cancer experts of Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou remind: brain cancer is one of commonly-seen malignant tumors, once discover the presence of brain cancer, go to standardized hospital for timely treatment.
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