Around 700,000 Americans are estimated to live with brain cancer, and by the end of 2022, nearly 90,000 more will have been diagnosed with the deadly disease. In 2020, brain and Central Nervous System (CNS) tumors took more than 200,000 lives worldwide. It is a debilitating condition that can significantly reduce a patient and their family’s quality of life.
The most common treatment methods for brain cancer are surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. While these treatment options can allow people with brain tumors to live for years after they are diagnosed, they aren’t risk free.
Chemotherapy and radiation, for instance, cause side effects such as anemia, constipation, nausea, vomiting, hair loss, fatigue and infection, while brain cancer surgery can cause seizures, behavior or personality changes, dizzy spells, speech problems and confusion.
Looking to update brain cancer treatment protocols and make treatment more effective, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) convened a panel consisting of a variety of medical professionals to re-evaluate existing brain cancer treatment guidelines, assess their effectiveness, and update them based on recent findings.
The panel included medical experts from oncology, radiation, neurosurgery and other medical fields who put their heads together to review recent scientific literature about brain cancer treatments. The ASCO put it together at the University of Virginia Cancer Center in 2020 and ran the panel for two full years, concluding the endeavor in 2022. Given the many individuals who brain cancer affects, making treatments more effective would benefit hundreds of thousands of people across the country.
David Schiff, a neurooncologist from the U.Va. Cancer Center who sat on the ASCO panel, notes the advancements brain cancer treatments have made over the past three decades. In the 1990s, he says, removing brain metastases surgically gained traction as it led to higher survival rates and improved patients’ quality of life.
Unfortunately, it also led to cognitive neurotoxicity as it would flood areas of the brain that were tumor-free with radiation, resulting in a reduction in brain function. Through the late 1990s and the early 2000s, a growing number of brain cancer treatment programs started including localized radiation.
The review showed that whole-brain radiation was frequently used in concert with other treatment options to reduce the risk to the patient. Targeted immunotherapy medications have also been found to offer some relief, especially in tumors caused by kidney cancer, lung cancer, or melanoma.. New guidelines now focus on growing treatment effectiveness while reducing toxicity, which spares patients from various side effects.
A number of companies, including CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP), are also developing treatments that could be more effective without placing a heavy burden on patients with regards to the attendant side effects of those novel remedies.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/CNSP
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