Newly Diagnosed

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Learning more about your child’s brain tumor diagnosis will empower you to move forward and take an active part in making the best possible choices for your child's care. Here you'll find information to help you anticipate what’s needed in the first few months after your child's diagnosis.

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Radiation Therapy

Radiation therapy uses beams of high-energy radiation to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors inside the body. It works to kill cancer cells by damaging the DNA in the tumor that tells it how to function and grow. When the DNA in the cancer cells is damaged beyond what the tumor can repair, the cells stop growing and die. Because you can aim the radiation, it is able to be more targeted than other types of therapies.

Treating Brain Tumors with Radiation

When a child is treated with radiation therapy, a machine aims a beam of high-energy radiation through the skin at parts of the brain and spine to kill cancer cells inside the body. The area and level of radiation your child may receive depends on the kind of brain tumor, where the tumor is located, and how old your child is. Radiation is administered in different ways based on the location, size, and characteristics of the brain tumor:

Photon radiation therapy is a higher energy version of the same X-rays used for diagnostic imaging. These high-energy X-rays can be pointed at a part of the body where a cancer is located and breaks the DNA inside the cancer cell. This makes it unable to repair or copy itself. As a result, the cancer cell dies.

Types of Photon Radiation Techniques: Advanced forms of photon therapy have been developed to have less side effects and promote healthy tissue:

3D Conformal Radiation Therapy (3D-CRT): Shapes the radiation beams to match the tumor.

Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT): Changes the strength of each beam to avoid healthy areas.

Image-Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT): Uses imaging before each treatment to ensure accuracy.

Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS): Delivers a high dose of radiation very precisely, often in one or a few sessions. Gamma Knife and CyberKnife radiation therapies are a type of SRS and are used to treat very small tumors.

Proton therapy is called heavy ion therapy. Like photon therapy, proton therapy also kills cancer cells by breaking the DNA. The difference is that it uses charged particles directly instead of x-rays. The key difference between photons and protons is photons pass through the cancer and out the other side, so on this exit, they hit normal cells and tissue. Proton therapy, on the other hand, stops at the tumor. This reduces harm to healthy tissue because there is no additional dose of treatment to the cells on the other side.

Some younger children may need sedation (medicine to help them sleep) to help them stay still during radiation treatment.

While radiation can be good at killing brain tumors, it can also damage normal tissues, especially in growing children. Radiation to a child’s brain can change how well they learn, and it can cause damage that may last a long time.

Because of this, your child’s treatment team will be very careful when recommending this treatment.

Talking to Your Child About Radiation

Age-appropriate videos can help parents and caregivers talk with children about cancer. The Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation’s Imaginary Friend Society is a series of short, animated videos that talk about cancer-related topics in a kid-friendly way. In the following video, Walter and Gus make an unlikely team of imaginary friends and explain radiation.