Brain Tumour and Anxiety Research

December Update

Hello everyone, just a quick update because it’s been a short while. The only treatment update to tell of is increasing the dose of my anti-seizure medication due to an emergence and increase of twitching all over my body which could be minor seizure activity. The only other change in symptoms is an increase in quantity and intensity of my headaches but nothing that’s particularly difficult to deal with, it’s more just the anxiety it can cause. Heart scan is on the 18th and I have to have a filling next week, and I’m really not a fan of the dentist.

Anxiety and Tumours

A 2003 Finnish study discusses the links between tumour locations and anxiety prevalence in patients. The results indicate that patients with tumours in the right hemisphere of the brain (e.g. Me) had significantly higher levels of anxiety than that of left sided tumour patients. The good news is patients with right hemisphere gliomas showed a general decrease in anxiety after surgical intervention to levels close to that of the general population. I don’t frequently get any reassuring information while researching Gliomas so it’s nice to see some, especially when relating to future quality of life. If i am one of the lucky ones with few surgical side effects and a decrease in anxiety which has been effecting my quality of life for 16-17 months now, then 2014 could be a much better year.
 http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/74/9/1278.full


I've done a lot of research into the genetics of brain tumours which revealed some interesting trends, and some promising information regarding my demographics giving me a good chance of having one of the kinder genetic profiles, but I’ll discuss all this after surgery when I know the genetic markings of my tumour for sure.



To go with the good news I’ll throw in a happy picture of some of my friends at the beach this weekend.
polkerris

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1 year update chemo, radiotherapy, surgery.

Its been over a year since I last posted, sorry about that. in June to August 2018 , I had 60gy of radiotherapy to my brain (32 days of treatment) with concurrent temozolomide, lost my hair in the areas which were close to the radiotherapy beams, but hair grows elsewhere. this was nauseating, unpleasant and increased my seizure activity, however, it was tolerable and wouldn't hesitate to do it again if advised. since then, I've been on a cycle of higher dose chemo (380mg p/day x5 consecutive days) every month for the year till today. this was also fairly tolerable once I had found my own way of doing. you're recommended to take at night before bed. however, I rarely slept well doing this. so I changed to taking it on an empty stomach in the morning and fasting till lunchtime minimum. this allowed chemo weeks to be very tolerable (provided I had enough rest) so I didn't work during chemo weeks. the week following chemo tended to be the worst week each month, frequent ill
Read more

Craniotomy number 2: 11 days post op

Image
Hi all, so my 2nd craniotomy was booked in for the 1st june. nearly 3 1/2 years after the first one. this time with the same surgical team and same set up regarding surgical technique with the IMRI again, so i don't need to re-explain the procedure. This time they would use a entry site in the brain to get to the different tumour sites. This meant using the same scalp wound as before, but extending the cranial opening both forwards and backwards to get more access to the tumour that is now wider dispersed. unfortunately i dont have access to my pre-op or intraoperative scans to demonstrate what they did. (not yet anyway). i had non contrast pre-op scans the night before and then a contrast scan the morning of which  i wasnt expecting, but i suppose it makes sense considering at this point it had been a whole 6 months since my last scan. A few things were different  this time. i'd been practicing fasting for health reasons for a couple months before this surgery. but i thi
Read more

high grade scan results

Image
i imagine this one will be short. I have some pictures to show this time. so i had my 3 month scan last week and saw my oncologist in london again. the long and short is things are continuing to grow and the enhancement has grown so its now high grade, but that's just a label, the growth rate was always uncomfortably high. Report: ''unfortunately there has been marked enlargement of the substantial right frontal/cingulate glioma with an increase in mass effect, and more prominenet contrast enhancement. Posteriorly the abnormality extends into the base of the parietal lobe on the right hand side as well as into the corpus collosum, and anteriorly/inferiorly reaches the right sided septal nuclei.'' you might remember i talked about the corpus collosum (the connecting bridge between the two halves of your brain) at the beginning of this blog, the fact that its taken 5 years to finally invade it despite the growth rate in other areas is surprising to me. but apparently
Read more