Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kennedy's seizure on Saturday has now been diagnosed as the result of a cancerous brain tumor. But his prognosis will depend on what doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital find as they continue their tests and weigh treatment options...
...biopsy of a suspicious growth in the 76-year-old senator's left parietal lobe revealed a malignant glioma, the most common type of brain tumor. It is diagnosed in some 25,000 Americans a year, and in 30% to 40% of cases, the first sign of the disease is a seizure - as was the case with Kennedy, who has been hospitalized since the weekend, but has not suffered another seizure. "Decisions regarding the best course of treatment for Senator Kennedy will be determined after further testing analysis," the senator's doctors said Tuesday in a statement. "He remains...
...chemotherapy agents that Kennedy and his doctors will most likely consider are Temodar, an oral drug, and Gliadel, a wafer embedded with a cancer-killing drug that surgeons place in the brain after the tumor is removed. The wafer dissolves over a period of two weeks and, if successful, destroys any remaining cancer cells in its wake. Radiation therapy for glioma usually begins two weeks following surgery, and lasts for about six weeks, says Dr. Henry Brem, director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who helped develop Gliadel and is not involved in Kennedy's treatment...
Treatment of glioma can be difficult, say researchers, because they still don't know what causes the disease. The cancer arises from glial cells, which outnumber neurons 10 to 1, and whose function is to support the electrical activity of neurons in the brain - but doctors don't know what pushes normal glial cells to become cancerous in the first place. "We know very little about the biology of malignant glioma," says Dr. Azad Bonni, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School who is investigating some of the molecular explanations behind the disease...
...made in people with Alzheimer's - which is made from a protein that all of us make, the amyloid precursor protein. [In people with Alzheimer's] that precursor protein is clipped by enzymes in the wrong place, and begins to form these little toxic parts that aggregate [in the brain] and eventually form fibrils and plaques that are the main pathologic feature of Alzheimer's disease. It's not clear why this happens exactly, and a lot of people have been studying it pretty hard. It's also not clear how much of this protein needs to be formed...