Loading...
Cranial radiation with chemotherapy is standard treatment for brain malignancies. It produces a survival benefit, even in high-grade gliomas, and frequently achieves cure in medulloblastomas. However, this comes at the cost of progressive brain atrophy resulting in permanent cognitive disability. The regional mechanisms and time course of such brain injury are incompletely understood, and there are no defined imaging biomarkers to inform treatment regimens that might avoid damage to normal tissue.
In a unique study of 14 patients with glioblastoma, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to characterize chemoradiotherapy-induced structural changes over 35 weeks in the uninvolved brain hemisphere. Objective measures included cortical, ven…