Despite progresses in surgery, radiotherapy, and in chemotherapy, an effective curative treatment of gliomas does not yet exist. Mortality is still close to 100% and the average survival of patients ...with GBM is less than 1 year. The efficacy of current anti-cancer strategies in brain tumors is limited by the lack of specific therapies against malignant cells. Besides, the delivery of the drugs to brain tumors is limited by the presence of the blood brain barrier. The oncogenesis of gliomas is characterized by several biological processes and genetic alterations, involved in the neoplastic transformation. The modulation of gene expression to more levels, such as DNA, mRNA, proteins and transduction signal pathways, may be the most effective modality to down-regulate or silence some specific gene functions. Gliomas are characterized by extensive microvascular proliferation and a higher degree of vasculature. In malignant gliomas targeted therapies efficacy is low. In this complex field, it seems to be very important to improve specific selective drugs delivery systems. Drugs, antisense oligonucleotides, small interference RNAs, engineered monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutic molecules may diffuse into CNS overcoming the BBB. Nanotechnology could be used both to improve the treatment efficacy and to reduce the adverse side effects.
Recent evidence indicates that the physiology and response to various drugs in the pediatric population differs from that of the adult and must be appreciated to be able to fully address the health ...needs of the pediatric population. Atlas of Pediatric Brain Tumors covers areas ranging from neuroimaging, the use of crush and touch preps during introperative consultation, classic histological features of brain tumors, tumor variants, and a miscellaneous group of challenging tumors. Chapters consist of essential diagnostic information and features highlighting recognized variants and their differential diagnoses. A section on molecular pathology and electron microscopy is also included for each tumor category, along with a list of classic reviews and innovative articles on each of the tumor entities as suggested reading at the end of each chapter. Created to fill a void in the practice of pediatric neuropathology, this practical and well-illustrated Atlas of Pediatric Brain Tumors represents a collection of interesting, common and unusual tumors for a diagnostic exercise by the reader.
Brain tumors Abrey, Lauren E; Mason, Warren P
01/2011
eBook
Despite the availability of many effective treatments, there remains a therapeutic nihilism associated with brain tumors. This highly readable second edition of Fast Facts: Brain Tumors challenges ...this view, starting from the premise that patients with brain tumors can truly benefit from a thoughtful multidisciplinary approach.
This comprehensive handbook covers all the salient features of the various brain tumors and treatment modalities in a way that will be useful to the practicing clinician.
- Advances in radiology and pathology that have led to more precise and detailed diagnoses
- Developments in molecular biology and imaging techniques that have improved available diagnostic modalities
- New neurosurgical techniques that have enabled operations on tumors that were previously considered inoperable
- Novel delivery systems that allow various treatments to reach tumors that are otherwise protected by the blood-brain barrier.
This fully updated edition of Fast Facts: Brain Tumors bridges the gap between primary care providers - whose role is pivotal in tumor detection and subsequent patient care - and first-level specialists such as general neurologists and neurosurgeons. Its key message is that selection of the best initial approach for an individual patient will result in the best overall outcome, both in terms of survival and quality of life.
Fast Facts: Brain Tumors is specifically for the primary care physician whose role is pivotal in tumor detection and subsequent patient care.
Divided Brains Rogers, Lesley J.; Vallortigara, Giorgio; Andrew, Richard J.
01/2013
eBook
Asymmetry of the brain and behaviour (lateralization) has traditionally been considered unique to humans. However, research has shown that this phenomenon is widespread throughout the vertebrate ...kingdom and found even in some invertebrate species. A similar basic plan of organisation exists across vertebrates. Summarising the evidence and highlighting research from the last twenty years, the authors discuss lateralization from four perspectives - function, evolution, development and causation - covering a wide range of animals, including humans. The evolution of lateralization is traced from our earliest ancestors, through fish and reptiles to birds and mammals. The benefits of having a divided brain are discussed, as well as the influence of experience on its development. A final chapter discusses outstanding problems and areas for further investigation. Experts in this field, the authors present the latest scientific knowledge clearly and engagingly, making this a valuable tool for anyone interested in the biology and behaviour of brain asymmetries.
Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a subtype of stroke with high mortality and morbidity due to the lack of effective therapy. Atorvastatin has been reported to alleviate early brain injury (EBI) ...following subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) via reducing reactive oxygen species, antiapoptosis, regulated autophagy, and neuroinflammation. Which was the related to the pyroptosis? Pyroptosis can be defined as a highly specific inflammatory programmed cell death, distinct from classical apoptosis and necrosis. However, the precise role of pyroptosis in atorvastatin‐mediated neuroprotection following SAH has not been confirmed. The present study aimed to investigate the neuroprotection and potential molecular mechanisms of atorvastatin in the SAH‐induced EBI via regulating neural pyroptosis using the filament perforation model of SAH in male C57BL/6 mice, and the hemin‐induced neuron damage model in HT‐22. Atorvastatin or vehicle was administrated 2 h after SAH and hemin‐induced neuron damage. The mortality, neurological score, brain water content, and neuronal death were evaluated. The results show that the atorvastatin treatment markedly increased survival rate, neurological score, greater survival of neurons, downregulated the protein expression of NLRP1, cleaved caspase‐1, interleukin‐1β (IL‐1β), and IL‐18, which indicated that atorvastatin‐inhibited pyroptosis and neuroinflammation, ameliorated neuron death in vivo/vitro subjected to SAH. Taken together, this study demonstrates that atorvastatin improved the neurological outcome in rats and reduced the neuron death by against neural pyroptosis and neuroinflammation.
This study demonstrates that atorvastatin improved the neurological outcome in rats and reduced the neuron death by against neural pyroptosis and neuroinflammation.
Brain metastases are the most dreaded complication of systemic cancer, affecting approximately 170,000 people a year, a far greater incidence than primary brain tumors. Advances in modern ...chemotherapy have led to an improved control of system cancers, often with agents that poorly penetrate the central nervous system, resulting in an increasing incidence of brain metastases. Traditional chemotherapy has had little impact on brain metastases. The main therapeutic option is radiation therapy, and in a small number of patients - surgery. However, refinements in all of these treatments offer some positive outcomes and an increased ability to stratify patients based on certain criteria. This book will bring current information on the presentation and management of patients with brain metastases, providing available data, giving guidelines that can be applied in day to day practice, updated information for neuro-surgeons, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, and neuro-oncologists, as well as an overview for physicians in training.
•An efficient 11-layers deep, multi-scale, 3D CNN architecture.•A novel training strategy that significantly boosts performance.•The first employment of a 3D fully connected CRF for ...post-processing.•State-of-the-art performance on three challenging lesion segmentation tasks.•New insights into the automatically learned intermediate representations.
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We propose a dual pathway, 11-layers deep, three-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for the challenging task of brain lesion segmentation. The devised architecture is the result of an in-depth analysis of the limitations of current networks proposed for similar applications. To overcome the computational burden of processing 3D medical scans, we have devised an efficient and effective dense training scheme which joins the processing of adjacent image patches into one pass through the network while automatically adapting to the inherent class imbalance present in the data. Further, we analyze the development of deeper, thus more discriminative 3D CNNs. In order to incorporate both local and larger contextual information, we employ a dual pathway architecture that processes the input images at multiple scales simultaneously. For post-processing of the network’s soft segmentation, we use a 3D fully connected Conditional Random Field which effectively removes false positives. Our pipeline is extensively evaluated on three challenging tasks of lesion segmentation in multi-channel MRI patient data with traumatic brain injuries, brain tumours, and ischemic stroke. We improve on the state-of-the-art for all three applications, with top ranking performance on the public benchmarks BRATS 2015 and ISLES 2015. Our method is computationally efficient, which allows its adoption in a variety of research and clinical settings. The source code of our implementation is made publicly available.
Tumors of the Brain and Spine focuses primarily on approaches to the treatment of benign, primary low-grade to high-grade, and metastatic tumors in the brain and spine, as practiced by surgeons and ...clinicians at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. The book is written mainly for the primary care oncologist, general neurologist, and general neurosurgeon. Discussion of treatment coverage focuses on neurosurgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, singly and in combination. Also included are chapters on symptom management, molecular genetics and neuropathology of intracranial tumors, leptomeningeal dissemination of systemic cancer, epidemiology of brain tumors, and innovative treatment strategies.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) account for the majority of injury-related deaths in the United States with roughly two million TBIs occurring annually. Due to the spectrum of severity and ...heterogeneity in TBIs, investigation into the secondary injury is necessary in order to formulate an effective treatment. A mechanical consequence of trauma involves dysregulation of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) which contributes to secondary injury and exposure of peripheral components to the brain parenchyma. Recent studies have shed light on the mechanisms of BBB breakdown in TBI including novel intracellular signaling and cell-cell interactions within the BBB niche. The current review provides an overview of the BBB, novel detection methods for disruption, and the cellular and molecular mechanisms implicated in regulating its stability following TBI.
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