Metastatic Brain Cancer Treatment in New Albany, IN
Baptist Health Floyd: Surviving Metastatic Brain Cancer
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Metastatic Brain Cancer Treatment in New Albany, IN, HealthTalks Transcript
Brian Snyder, MD, Neurosurgery:
Metastatic brain cancer is the movement of cancer from somewhere else in your body to your brain. The ways in which it can be detected are via symptoms or via surveillance imaging. If you become symptomatic, have new difficulties with your ability to speak or new difficulties with your ability to move one side of your body, most likely we’re going to get a CT scan. It’s unlikely to miss something that is causing symptoms. With that imaging, we would then follow it up with the gold standard — the MRI. It’s our goal at that point to figure out what the source is.
The three prongs of treatment of cancer are chemotherapeutics, radiation and surgery. If somebody has a small number of metastatic disease on their brain, surgical resection is usually the first kind of treatment modality. With surgery, we can remove the cancer to a very high extent. I think I enjoy seeing these patients sometimes surprised at how high their quality of life remains after a brain surgery. Some people have the impression that it’s: ‘well, it’s over now. I have brain cancer, there’s nothing to do, I’m just going to kind of fade away.’ I think, no, let’s fight for the best quality of life that you can have for the longest period of time.
Next Steps and Useful Resources
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How Long Does an MRI Take?