A great conference for patients, caregivers, friends & family members

I highly recommend this conference. 

You will find great brain tumor surgeons, researchers, victims, caregivers, and friends and family members. I’ve found everybody who attends to be good listeners and full of honest advice and time to listen to you and your concerns.

Here’s the link: http://hope.abta.org/site/TR?fr_id=3521&pg=entry

The opening sentence of the email from the ABTA about the conference says “The ABTA’s annual Patient and Family Conference is where patients, families and caregivers come together to learn more about the latest advances in brain tumor research, treatment and care.” I want to highlight two important words “latest advances.”

If you haven’t been reading all the brain tumor news that’s been spilling out of research studies of late, here’s a good place to get a sense of all the new tools we have to fight brain tumors. The ABTA marketing folks have highlighted that in their first two bullet points saying:

• “Physicians will present the latest precision medicine treatment options and symptom management techniques for low-grade glioma, high-grade glioma and metastatic brain tumors

• Researchers and doctors will highlight treatment advances in neurosurgery, radiation and immunotherapy”

Importantly the conference includes “A special session for the newly diagnosed will cover how to navigate the early days of a brain tumor diagnosis and what information patients, families and caregivers would need to know in order to be empowered with information and resources to make informed decisions throughout their treatment and care.”

Please know that the conference costs $100. If you are a victim, caregiver or love one, I believe that you will find this to be a particularly good investment.

If I wasn’t already scared…

According to an article posted on Accelerate Brain Tumor Cure “Brain tumors fly under the radar of the body’s defense forces by coating their cells with extra amounts of a specific protein, new research shows.

Like a stealth fighter jet, the coating means the cells evade detection by the early-warning immune system that should detect and kill them. The stealth approach lets the tumors hide until it’s too late for the body to defeat them.”

Now that’s just unfair. We have a hard enough time killing the little buggers when we find them. And, disturbingly, these occur in “…some of the most dangerous brain tumors, called high grade malignant gliomas.”

Learning that lethal gliomas have stealth capacity is just another reason to sleep uneasily.

Here’s a link to the article I originally read: http://abc2.org/article/brain-tumors-fly-under-radar-stealth-jets-new-u-m-research-suggests

And here’s a link to the original abstract in the journal Cancer Research: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2014/07/18/0008-5472.CAN-14-1203.abstract

Copyright: <a href='http://www.123rf.com/profile_pariwatlp'>pariwatlp / 123RF Stock Photo</a>

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation researchers finding hope in new anti-brain tumor drug

I never knew that Oklahoma was a hotbed of ground-breaking brain cancer research until I read this article from Greg Elwell, a public affairs specialist at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation: http://newsok.com/omrf-researchers-finding-some-hope-in-anti-brain-tumor-drug/article/3809147/?page=1

The article reports that “a compound developed by OMRF scientist Dr. Rheal Towner has shown success in fighting extremely aggressive brain tumors in rats and in human cells.”

What’s different about this therapy, is that the “…anti-brain tumor drug developed at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation could prove more effective than current therapies because it attacks cancer cells at multiple key points.”

This is the key point of a paper by OMRF scientists Rheal Towner, Ph.D., and Robert Floyd, Ph.D., published in the journal “Neuro-Oncology” which showed that OKN007 was successful when pitted against extremely aggressive glioma tumors in rats and in human cells.

“One of the main dangers of gliomas is their ability to keep growing. Not only are they getting bigger, but they're marshaling resources by growing blood vessels, invading cells and turning off the process that tells cells when to die,” Towner said. “We've found that OKN007 targets all of these factors.”

Here’s a link to the journal abstract: http://neuro-oncology.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/01/16/neuonc.nos337.abstract

And yes, I do love the fact that this therapy has “007” in its name, it gives me the feeling that we have a secret agent fighting cancer on our side.

Image credit: <a href='http://www.123rf.com/photo_5761649_cancer-medical-illness-disease-as-concept-art.html'>kentoh / 123RF Stock Photo</a>

Got Gliomas? Don’t Eat (for a bit)

According to an article posted on http://www.oncologynurseadvisor.com,   Valter D. Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, Davis, School of Gerontology, and his colleagues have published results of a new study which shows that a controlled fasting period lasting no more than 48 hours improved the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation therapy in mice with gliomas. (If you don’t know what gliomas is, be happy that you don’t.)

In previous research, Longo's team showed that short-term fasting made cancer cells vulnerable to the toxic effects of chemotherapy while protecting healthy cells. In the new study, the investigators tested the effect of starvation on glioma cells by depriving mice of food for 48 hours prior to radiotherapy or prior to chemotherapy with temozolomide, the standard therapeutic agent used after attempted surgical resection of glioma.

Compared with mice that underwent fasting alone or radiation alone, more than twice as many mice receiving both interventions survived to the end of the trial period.

Here’s a link to the OncologyNurseAdvisor.com posting: http://www.oncologynurseadvisor.com/short-term-fasting-enhances-brain-tumor-treatment/article/262007/

And here’s a link to the abstract: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0044603