Radiotherapy and chemotherapy for brain tumours

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a treatment which uses drugs to treat cancer cells. It works on cancer cells in three ways:

  1. It kills cancer cells
  2. It alters the cells damaging potential
  3. It ‘tees up’ the cancer cells for treatment with further drugs (also called pro-drug therapy).

Chemotherapy will not be offered to everybody. Each case will be assessed individually by the healthcare team, who should also be the people you ask any questions you may have about this treatment.

Here are some suggested questions that you might find helpful to ask if your loved one is offered Chemotherapy:

  • What chemotherapy is being offered?
  • What will the side effects be, physical and emotional?
  • When will they kick in?
  • If chemotherapy is offered, can molecular testing be done to see how the tumour will respond to the treatment?
  • How long will it take them to recover from the treatment?

Radiotherapy

Radiation therapy kills brain tumour cells with high-energy x-rays, gamma rays, or protons. It usually follows surgery. The radiation kills brain tumour cells that may remain in the area, following surgery. Sometimes, people who can’t have surgery have radiation therapy instead. It may also be given in combination with chemotherapy. Radiotherapy is used in 50% of all cancer patients.

Radiosurgery

Radiosurgery is a medical procedure used for brain tumour treatment, as well as treatment for other forms of cancer. It uses non-invasive, highly precise radiation beams, usually in one single session, to destroy painlessly or shrink tumours that could otherwise be inaccessible for open surgery.

It is also known as stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) when used to target brain tumours.

You may also hear these being referred to as Gamma Knife and Cyberknife. These are the commercial names, like Hoover is for vacuum cleaners.

  • What type of radiotherapy do you suggest?
  • What will the side effects be, physical and emotional? And when will they kick in?
  • Should someone come with them to radiotherapy sessions?
  • Will they lose their hair?
  • How long will it take to recover from the treatment?
  • Is stereotactic radiotherapy/radiosurgery suitable?

Our Radiotherapy resource may help to answer some questions you might have and go through Radiotherapy treatment in more detail.

You can download this here.

Or if you would like a copy sent to you in the post email hello@brainstrust.org.uk 

Proton Beam Therapy for brain tumours

For proton beam therapy, the source of radiation is protons rather than x-rays (photons)

This is a type of particle therapy which uses a beam of protons to irradiate the tumour. The proton beam is aimed at the tumour. The dose of radiation to normal tissue from a proton beam is less than the dose from an x-ray beam. All protons of a given energy have a certain range; no proton penetrates beyond that distance, so this treatment is appropriate in cases where there is a need for the radiation dose to fall off to zero after it hits the target

Proton beam therapy can’t treat all cancers. It is just another form of radiotherapy, and not all cancers can be treated with radiotherapy.

  • Proton beam therapy is useful in the following situations:
  • Tumours that are near important parts of the body. For example, tumours near the eye, brain and spinal cord.
  • Childhood cancers of the eye, brain and spinal cord. Proton beam therapy lessens the chance of harming healthy developing tissue. It isn’t an effective treatment for cancers that have spread (metastases).

We have developed our Guide to Proton Beam Therapy which has been designed to help you feel more informed about the treatment and know where further help and information may be available.

Find out more about the guides here.

Did this information make you feel more resourced, more confident or more in control?

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Introduction

The Brain Tumour Data Dashboard lets you explore up -to-date, population level data about the brain tumours diagnosed in England between 2013 and 2015. Using the drop down menus on the left you can select different groups of patients to view in the charts below. In these charts the number of patients for every 100 diagnoses is displayed as images of people. Patients have been grouped by date of diagnosis, type of tumour, age, gender, and region in England.

For each group of patients you can explore the different routes to diagnosis, the proportion of those who received chemotherapy or radiotherapy, as well as the survival of the patients within each group. For more information about what these metrics mean please see the glossary.

How to use

  1. Select the year of diagnosis using the drop down menu.
  2. Select your patient group of interest from the four drop down menus in the following order:
    1. Tumour group
    2. Age at diagnosis
    3. Region of England
    4. Gender of patient
  3. To view a second chart to compare different groups of patients, click the ‘compare’ button.The second chart will appear below the first chart.

*Note that the tool is best used on a laptop or tablet rather than a mobile phone*

Unavailable data

Some of the data in these charts is not available.There are two main reasons for this:

  1. How the data has been grouped

If you cannot select a patient group from the drop down menus, the data is unavailable because of how the data has been organised.

Public Health England has grouped the data like a branching tree. The bottom of the tree contains all the patients with brain tumours, and then each branch divides the data by a certain characteristics, like age, or location of tumour. But the data is divided in an order, starting with location of the tumour (endocrine or brain), then by age, region, and gender. Age is at the start because it makes a bigger difference to survival rates and treatment rates than gender or region. Sometimes, after the data has been split by type of tumour and age, there is not enough data to be split again. This is because to protect patient confidentiality groups cannot contain less than 100 patients. Because some groups cannot be split further, you cannot create ‘totals’ for everyone by region or gender. For example, you cannot see results for all ages by region, or all brain tumours by gender. If these totals were calculated and released, it might be possible to identify patients, which is why Public Health England cannot release this data.

  1. Statistical reasons and data availability

If you can select a patient group from the chart menus, but the chart does not display, the data is unavailable for one of several reasons:

  1. Data is not yet available for the selected year from Public Health England.
  2. Data is not available because the data quality is too poor to release this statistic.
  3. Data is not available as the statistic is not appropriate for this group.
  4. Data is not available because the standard error of the estimate was greater than 20% and so the estimate has been supressed.

Up to date brain tumour data

Brain tumour data may influence the decisions you make about your care. Data also helps you understand the bigger picture, or landscape, in which you find yourself.

Brain tumour data and statistics influence the focus, and work of organisations like brainstrust. The information helps us to understand the scale and impact of the problems we are setting out to solve.

This tool helps you understand the landscape in which you find yourself having been diagnosed with a brain tumour. This landscape can be particularly tricky to navigate as there are many different types of brain tumour, all of which have a different impact.

The information you see represents the most up-to-date, official, population level brain tumour data available for England. Over time we will be adding to the brain tumour data available and publishing reports, with recommendations, as a result of what we learn from this data.

The data behind this content has come from Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and is a direct result of the ‘Get Data Out’ project.

This project provides anonymised population level brain tumour data for public use in the form of standard output tables, accessible here: http://cancerdata.nhs.uk/standardoutput

Incidence

The number or rate (per head of population) of new cases of a disease diagnosed in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of cases divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Malignant

Malignant tumours which grow by invasion into surrounding tissues and have the ability to metastasise to distant sites

Mortality

The number or rate (per head of population) of deaths in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of deaths divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Non-malignant

Not cancerous. Non-malignant tumours may grow larger but do not spread to other parts of the body.

Survival

The length of time from the date of diagnosis for a disease, such as cancer, that patients diagnosed with the disease are still alive. In a clinical trial, measuring the survival is one way to see how well a new treatment works. Also called ‘overall survival’ or ‘OS’.

Routes to Diagnosis

Under the ‘Routes to Diagnosis’ tab in the Brain Tumour Data Dashboard, you can explore the ways patients have been diagnosed with brain tumours. There are many ways, or routes, for cancers to be diagnosed in the NHS. A ‘route to diagnosis’ is the series of events between a patient and the healthcare system that leads to a diagnosis of cancer. The routes include:

  1. Two Week Wait

Patients are urgently referred by their GP for suspected cancer via the Two Week Wait system and are seen by a specialist within 2 weeks where they are diagnosed.

  1. GP referral

Diagnosis via a GP referral includes routine and urgent referrals where the patient was not referred under the Two Week Wait system.

  1. Emergency Presentation

Cancers can be diagnosed via emergency situations such as via A&E, emergency GP referral, emergency transfer or emergency admission.

  1. Outpatient

Outpatient cancer diagnoses include diagnoses via an elective route which started with an outpatient appointment that is either a self-referral or consultant to consultant referral. (It does not include those under the Two Week Wait referral system).

  1. Inpatient elective

Diagnosis via an inpatient elective route is where diagnosis occurs after the patient has been admitted into secondary care from a waiting list, or where the admission is booked or planned.

  1. Death Certificate Only

Diagnoses made by Death Certificate Only are made where there is no more information about the cancer diagnosis other than the cancer related death notifications. The date of diagnosis is the same as that of the date of death.

  1. Unknown

For some patients with a cancer diagnosis, there is no relevant data available to understand the route to diagnosis.

 

More information

If any of the statistical terms in this section of the brainstrust website are hard to understand, we recommend looking them up here:

Cancer Research UK’s Cancer Statistics Explained

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/cancer-stats-explained/statistics-terminology-explained#heading-Seven

If you are looking for help understanding terms relating specifically to brain tumours, and treatment, then the brainstrust glossary is available here:

https://www.brainstrust.org.uk/advice-glossary.php