Brain tumours in children: New methods established to improve diagnostics

Brain tumours are among the most common malignant diseases in children and make up the most frequent cause of cancer-related death in this age group due to their often highly aggressive progression. In their search for better treatment options, the research team headed by Johannes Gojo from MedUni Vienna's Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has now succeeded in establishing two promising new methods that will make it much easier to diagnose, choose a therapy and monitor the response to treatment in future. The study results were recently published in the specialist journals Acta Neuropathologica and Cancers. For the newly established methods, a few millilitres of blood or cerebrospinal fluid from the affected children are sufficient to make a diagnosis, monitor the course of the tumour disease or detect the presence of a prognostically unfavourable marker. Currently, planning the therapy and monitoring requires time-consuming imaging procedures that can often be performed only under general anaesthesia in young children. "The molecular methods we are researching do not place any further burden on the young patients and could provide important findings for individually coordinated therapy measures within just a few hours," says study leader Johannes Gojo, emphasising the relevance of the study results. The minimally invasive procedures were researched on two types of brain tumours: the rare "embryonal tumours with multi-layered rosettes" (ETMR), which occur mainly in infants, and a particularly aggressive form of medulloblastoma (MB).