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Prevalence of Brain Tumors

Program: The ABC's for Primary Brain Tumors
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Andrew Schorr:

Well, science will answer that question sooner or later, but in the meantime you needed care. So you had the surgery and after that starts radiation and also drug therapy. And so that's a wonderful place to bring in your doctor, sort of the quarterback for your care and a gentleman who just specializes in the treatment of brain tumors, and that's Dr. Jeffrey Raizer. Dr. Raizer is the medical director of the neuro oncology program in the department of neurology at Northwestern Memorial, and he's co director of Northwestern's brain tumor institute. We're going to hear more about Darren's relationship with the institute too.

Dr. Raizer, welcome to the program. So surgery often comes first when something is operable, and we're talking about I think about 17,000 people who have primary brain tumors a year in the US?

Dr. Raizer:

Yes. If we look at the sum total, I don't know if you want to call them intracranial primary tumors, it's about 40,000, but the most common of those is really gliomas. And there's a spectrum of certain tumors that we see in children and some are fairly aggressive and some are much more benign, and there's a spectrum of those that we see in adults, and they don't really overlap too much. By and large what the pediatric neuro oncologists treat is really different than what I treat on a day to day basis. But for my population the most common would be a glioma, and the malignant ones take up the vast majority of that.

Andrew Schorr:

Right. Now, here comes Darren, and I want to see if I can pronounce it right because it sounds like, these are difficult words, oligodendroglioma. So that's a type of glioma, I take it.

Dr. Raizer:

Yes. Glioma is sort of a generic catch phrase. Glial cells are sort of the supporting structure of the brain that support the neurons and help nourish them, and they make the coating for the nerves so they transmit faster. So oligodendroglial cells are what makes the white matter in the brain because they coat the nerves, but if those cells go awry they become oligodendrogliomas, versus astrocytes which help nourish the neurons. If they go awry then you get an astrocytoma. And then there's the ependymal cells which can become ependymomas. But by far the vast majority of what we see is really astrocytic tumors.

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