How are brain tumors different from other tumors?

Brain Tumors are different than any other tumor in the body. If you have a tumor in your arm, that tumor may be cancerous or benign. And there, it's very clear cut. But you can have a tumor in the brain that's not a cancer, and yet it' deep in the brain--I had someone recently that came from Ecuador with a young girl with a deep-seated tumor in the brain stem. The tumor itself was benign, but where it was, you could say it was malignant. It was extremely dangerous to get to it, so dangerous that everybody said she was going to die from it. She had previous surgery in her home country, and we were lucky to sneak in to the brain, take it out, and she woke right up and her symptoms were gone.

The term ""benign"" and ""cancerous"" are very different when it comes to what we do in neurosurgery. Even a benign tumor in the spinal cord or brain, just by location, can be very treacherous. The good news is a lot of tumors we take out as neurosurgeon are benign. Unfortunately, some tumors are malignant, and even if we do a beautiful job taking the tumor out, patients sometimes need other therapies and the tumors may come back. That's why there's so much emphasis now on research and trying to figure out how to cure these cancerous tumors. It's always a wonderful day when we take out a benign tumor and the patient is cured.

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