Singer Sheryl Crow's news that she has been diagnosed with a meningioma, the most common kind of benign brain tumor, has raised a lot of questions for readers. USA TODAY asked Anders Cohen, chief of neurosurgery and spine surgery at The Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York, to answer a few of them.
Q: Crow, 50, says she had an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, after she had memory problems. Why would a brain tumor cause memory problems?
A: That is definitely the kind of symptom that could be caused by this type of tumor. Generally a tumor that affects memory would be located in the left frontal lobe of the brain.
Q: Do these tumors always cause memory problems?
A: No. The brain is like real estate. It's all location, location, location. We have the brain pretty well mapped out. What symptom you have is based on what part of the brain the tumor is arising from.
Q: Crow has said she doesn't plan to have surgery. Can you live with a tumor like this?
A: A lot of times, these things don't become symptomatic in your lifetime. We find them more now because we are looking for them. Here in New York, there is an MRI machine on every corner. But if it's not causing symptoms, we leave it alone. Or you could do surveillance for six months, and repeat the MRI. A lot of meningiomas don't grow.
Q: When they're treated, is surgery the only option?
A: The vast majority have surgery. There is no chemotherapy, no drug option. Radiation can be used if they are very deep, if they are near the brainstem, if just getting to them is risky.
Q: Crow was treated for breast cancer in 2006, and I've read that meningiomas are more common in women. Is there any chance that this tumor is related to her breast cancer or the treatment for breast cancer?
A: No, breast cancer doesn't make you more suspectible to meningiomas. Some meningiomas are estrogen sensitive. They are usually very, very slow growing. They may start out the size of a pinhead. When women hit menopause, they get these hormonal swings and the tumor may start growing.
Q: Just to allay the fears of the worried well out there, what other issues can cause memory problems, other than brain tumors?
A: Some women who have had breast cancer develop something called "chemo brain," or cognitive impairment, which we also see in children treated for cancer. � Some women also complain about memory problems during menopause or just because of natural aging.
There are also a lot of medications where it has those side effects, such as beta blockers (used to treat heart disease). Antidepressants, like Zoloft and Paxil, can make people slow down so they can't finish the crossword puzzle. There are also environmental stresses, like work.
When patients have to spend a few days in the surgical ICU (intensive care unit), even college professors become disoriented. � We didn't evolve to be Facebooking and tweeting. All this instantaneous, huge amount of information. We didn't evolve this way.�
I hear about people with headaches all the time. Even though I'm in the meningioma business, that doesn't set off my alarms. When something isn't right, people always think, 'You have a brain tumor.' The reassurance I can give you is that the vast majority of people don't.
No comments:
Post a Comment