HAVE I GOT A BRAIN TUMOUR?
A new fear is taking hold of middle-aged men. Twenty years ago men in their middle years worried about cancer. Cancer was just beginning to be openly discussed in the media and anxiety about it was high.
Then about 5 years ago Alzheimer’s began to receive unprecedented publicity and they worried they were getting that too. You could tell from the way they joked about it. ‘Oops! Excuse my Alzheimers,’ they would say, having just forgotten an arrangement or experienced a memory lapse.
Now there seems to be a new concern about brain tumours. Headaches, mood swings, poor performance or erratic behaviour often elicit references to such tumours. ‘Do I have a brain tumour, doctor?’ is a question some general practitioners say they are increasingly being asked.
More men are now being investigated for these tumours and the incidence of the tumours in Australia is rising.
As a brain tumour invades and compresses normal brain tissue, it causes that bit of tissue to malfunction. Depending on where the malfunction occurs, people experience different symptoms. Some symptoms, such as those that involve movement, vision or speech, are easily recognised, and the tumour can be found early.
Symptoms that affect behaviour and cognition usually take longer to declare themselves. This is partly because the symptoms are less explicit and because the very fact that cognition and intellect are involved may blunt the awareness of sufferers themselves.
Compression caused by the tumour can also irritate brain tissue and lead to epilepsy. Rather than involving the whole body, the seizures arc localised. When it comes to treatment, the benign/malignant distinction is important. Benign tumours are treated with surgery and complete recovery is possible.
Malignant tumours are treated with surgery and radiation. While the prognosis for large aggressive tumours is poor, long-term survival is possible after the removal of low-grade malignant tumours.
There is light on the horizon. A new form of focused radiotherapy offers hope to people with tumours deep in the brain. Rather than cutting these tumors out manually and damaging structures along the way, they can be removed with radiotherapy.
Doctors arc also optimistic about a new form of phototherapy that kills tumour cells by using their susceptibility to light against them.
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