Improving Prognoses in Patients With Brain Tumors or Hereditary Cancers

While the prognoses of patients with brain tumors and hereditary cancers have improved over the past few years, each can be further enhanced in separate ways. John Henson, MD, spoke with CancerNetwork® during a site visit to Georgia Cancer Center in Augusta, GA, about some of these ways.

First, Henson, director of the Hereditary Brain Tumor Clinic and the Brain Tumor Program at Georgia Cancer Center, emphasized that while these disease states are related, they also have their differences. Brain cancer, for example, is not a disease state where patients can be practically screened routinely, as they are too rare. Instead, the optimal way to improve the prognosis of patients would be by developing improved treatments.

Regarding hereditary disease, his answer was practically the opposite; patients must be screened often to catch diseases early. One example Henson gave was for pancreatic cancer. If the BRCA2 gene mutation is identified in a family, then the entire family must get screened. By doing so, this may help catch the disease in its earlier stages, such as stage I or II, as opposed to stage IV, when the symptoms would be much worse.This change, as Henson said, could have a significant impact in favor of survivability for those who are diagnosed with cancer.

Transcript:

CancerNetwork: Looking towards the future, what areas must institutions focus on to improve the prognosis of patients with brain tumors or hereditary cancers?

Those are 2 related but somewhat different areas. Improving the prognosis for brain tumors comes down to improving treatments. We do not anticipate that there will ever be a time when we will screen for primary brain tumors. It’s too rare. I do not think that will happen. Basically, what we need are better treatments to control the tumor once it’s detected.

In the hereditary sphere, it’s the other way around, where if we know, for example, that a family has a mutation in a gene called BRCA2, everybody in the family who has that mutation needs screening for pancreatic cancer. We can get all those people screened and detect if they develop a pancreatic cancer when it’s early—stage I or stage II—and prevent people from coming in with terrible symptoms and stage IV pancreatic cancer, where the options are [quite] limited. If we can move into that earlier detection and early treatment mode, that will have a profound impact on the survivability of these tumors.