Explainer | How to spot brain tumour symptoms, their treatment and the promising advances made in the fight against brain cancer
- ‘It’s difficult to determine which brain cancer is the worst,’ an expert says; each type of brain tumour has its own challenges and prognosis
- Brain cancer has no lifestyle causes that can be managed to mitigate risk, but new targeted drugs and CAR T-cell therapy show promise in its treatment
When we received news of my mother-in-law’s brain tumour, we feared the worst.
We were lucky; her tumour, discovered when she was in her late sixties, and which caused a loss of balance, was not cancer.
When the doctor surgically removed it, he described the mass as very hard. This suggested it had been growing for a long time, he said, and drew an analogy with nature – “the older a tree, the harder the wood”.
Surgery fixed her, and she ran out of years before the tumour ever became problematic again.
Dr Maverick Tsang Wai-kong, a specialist in clinical oncology at the Hong Kong Integrated Oncology Centre, says tumours are usually described as benign or malignant (meaning they are cancerous), and are classified according to their grade and stage.
Grades are listed as numbers, and stages as Roman numerals; they can have a value of I to IV. The higher the number, the more advanced the cancer, so at stage III, the cancer is bigger than at stage II and may have spread to surrounding tissues. Stage IV describes the spread – called metastasis – to other organs.