Students in leadership positions learn about brain tumors and gain real world experience in running a non-profit business while raising funds for brain tumor research. Beneficiaries of the money we raise are Barrow Neurological Institute, National Brain Tumor Society, Phoenix Children's Hospital, Translational Genomics Research Institute, and University of Arizona.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world..." Gandhi
February 29th 12-3 pm
ANGEL’S STORY - as told by Angel's mother
On May 4, 2018 Angel Carden was like any ordinary 8 year old boy. He was just finishing up 3rd grade and enjoying the last days of Little League Baseball. After a day on the baseball field, Angel started to have seizures later on that night. We rushed him to an emergency room and a CT scan discovered that Angel had a large tumor growing in the back of his brain. Our world felt like it was ending, we were scared, and we desperately feared for our son’s dear life.
Angel was immediately transferred by ambulance to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, only one of a few places in the country that could properly care for our son. By the time we were admitted the tumor was causing increased pressure to his brain. This caused Angel to continuously vomit, barely speak, unable to move and started to lose his vision. Angel’s neurosurgeon Dr. Ruth Bristol was the one to diagnose our son with Stage 4 Medulloblastoma. She let us know that he had to immediately have surgery for 2 shunts, to relieve the pressure on his brain before any permanent damage was done. We spent 14 days in the Pediatric Intense Care Unit and Angel’s final surgery lasted over 7 hours to remove his brain tumor.
We prayed so much during that time, and had started to meet so many new people that cared for our son as much as we did. After the surgery Angel could barely move or talk, which is common with posterior fossa syndrome. When we left the hospital at the end of May, Angel was in a wheelchair and his Dad had to lift him into our car to take him home. Every day I watch my son defy the odds against him. He went to physical, speech, and occupational therapy; exceeded every goal they set for him in the span of 4 months. Since then Angel has went on to complete Proton Radiation Therapy as Scottsdale Mayo Clinic under Dr. Sameer Keole for about 8 weeks. He now walks, talks, and went from writing with his left hand to right hand. Angel is even going to school when he feels up to it. Angel just wanted to share his story to never give up, and he wants to give back for every child that may be going through the same circumstance that Angel has been through.
PLEASE SUPPORT SSBTR to help Angel and the far too many like him!
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that a rare childhood cancer, medulloblastoma, forms an unexpectedly intricate network to drive its growth. Some tumor cells actually turn into another type of cell altogether. The discovery raises the exciting possibility that doctors may be able to intervene to stop the disease – and possibly other cancers as well.
Radiation oncologists at the University of Louisville have for the first time in the U.S. treated a metastatic brain tumor with intraoperative radiation therapy supplied with the use of iCAD’s Xoft Axxent Electronic Brachytherapy System.
Glioblastomas are relentless, hard-to-treat, and often lethal brain tumors. Yale scientists have enlisted a most unlikely ally in efforts to treat this form of cancer — elements of the Ebola virus. The irony is that one of the world’s deadliest viruses may be useful in treating one of the deadliest of brain cancers,”
A study published in JAMA Oncology confirmed an association between maximal resection of contrast-enhanced tumor and overall survival (OS) in patients with glioblastoma across all subgroups.
Additionally, the researchers found that maximal resection of non-contrast-enhanced tumor was associated with longer OS in younger patients, regardless of isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) status, and among patients with IDH-wild-type glioblastoma regardless of the methylation status of the promoter region of the DNA repair enzyme O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase.
A cancer tumor's ability to mutate allows it to escape from chemotherapy and other attempts to kill it. So, encouraging mutations would not be a logical path for cancer researchers. Yet a Mayo Clinic team and their collaborators took that counterintuitive approach and discovered that while it created resistance to chemotherapy, it also made tumors sensitive to immunotherapy.
Survival may more than double for adults with glioblastoma, the most common and deadly type of brain tumor, if neurosurgeons remove the surrounding tissue as aggressively as they remove the cancerous core of the tumor.
This discovery, reported in a retrospective study headed by researchers at UC San Francisco, is welcome news for those in the glioblastoma community, which celebrated its last breakthrough in 2005 with the introduction of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide.
