Treatments

Your personal care team at Columbia Cancer includes experts from many disciplines, including surgery, medical oncology, radiation oncology, and more. Your team will create an individualized treatment plan for you based on:

• Your age, overall health, and medical history
• The type, location, and size of your tumor
• Whether the tumor has spread
• How well you might tolerate specific treatments
• Your expectations and preferences

Sometimes your doctor might recommend that you watch and wait for changes to the tumor rather than treating it right away.

In some cases, surgery may be the best option to treat brain and spinal tumors. Removing the tumor relieves pressure on your brain, spine, or nerves. You might also have radiation therapy and medication therapy.

Surgery

If you have a brain or spinal tumor, your surgeon’s goal is to remove as much of the tumor as possible without harming healthy tissue or causing you to lose function. Sometimes it’s not possible to remove the entire tumor due to its size, location, or spread.

Radiation Therapy

Radiation therapy causes cancer cells to break or die by targeting the DNA with high-energy particles, such as X-rays, gamma rays, electron beams, or protons. Radiation oncologists direct these particles to the tumor site from outside of your body to precisely target cancer cells, often sparing nearby tissue. You might hear this called external beam radiation therapy. For brain and spine tumors, you might have a version called image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) or intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT).

You might have radiation therapy to shrink your tumor, to destroy parts of the tumor or cancer cells left behind after surgery, or to help relieve symptoms.

You’ll have radiation therapy on a schedule your radiation oncologist sets—daily, weekly, every other day, or a single treatment.

We use targeted radiation treatments to zero in on the brain tumor while sparing important healthy tissue as much as possible. Your radiation oncologist and care team will discuss the specific treatment plan that is right for you. These types of radiation therapy include: 

• Adaptive radiotherapy. We offer Ethos™, a new technology uses artificial intelligence to personalize a patient’s radiation treatments. Ethos enables radiation oncologists to quickly recalculate treatment to account for changes in the size and shape of the tumor and accommodate any anatomical changes in the patient. Patient treatment plans can be reassessed and optimized before every session. This would allow maximal radiation dose to be delivered to the tumor while reducing the risk of irradiating nearby health tissues and providing potentially better cancer control.
• Stereotactic radiosurgery. We use the Gamma Knife Icon for a “frameless” stereotactic radiosurgery. The Gamma Knife Icon has image-guided monitoring systems that can track patient movement during treatment. These innovative treatments allow for more precise, high-dose radiation treatments for brain tumors without restricting the patient’s position with an immobile frame.  
• Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT). Allows physicians to take a series of images during the treatment.  These detailed images can help improve the accuracy of radiation therapy in selected patients, allowing physicians to deliver higher doses of radiation which can mean shorter treatment schedules.
• Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). An advanced form of three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3DCRT), using highly controlled photon or proton beams to deliver precise radiation that conforms to the shape of the tumor. The goal of IMRT is to deliver the highest dosage of radiation more directly to the tumor, sparing healthy tissue and limiting side effects.  

Medication Therapy

Some brain tumors respond to chemotherapy or targeted therapy, but the blood-brain barrier keeps many drugs from reaching the brain. Chemotherapy is usually reserved for people with faster-growing tumors and tumors that have come back after initial treatment.

Clinical Trials

You may qualify to participate in a clinical trial, which is a research study to learn more about promising new treatments or supportive care therapies. The hope is to improve the quality of life and survivorship of cancer patients. Columbia Cancer offers many brain and spinal tumor clinical trials. You can talk to your care team about whether a clinical trial is an option for you.

Learn More About Clinical Trials

Palliative Care

Brain and spinal tumors themselves can cause many physical, neurological, and emotional symptoms, and so can the treatment for these tumors.

Palliative care can help you deal with the physical symptoms and side effects of your treatment. It also includes support for the emotional, social, and financial issues that come with having a brain or spine tumor. When you have palliative care alongside your medical treatment—even starting when you’re diagnosed—you will likely feel physically better and have a better quality of life.

Palliative care often includes your family members or loved ones, giving them the support they need to support you.

Palliative care can include:

• Emotional and spiritual support
• Nutrition support
• Medications like corticosteroids, which help reduce brain swelling and pain without pain medications and anti-seizure medications to stop seizure activity.
• Services to help you relax, such as mindfulness, yoga, massage and reiki
• Treatment like chemotherapy and radiation therapy, with the goal of reducing symptoms rather than killing the cancer cells.

Our palliative care team at Columbia Cancer are compassionate caregivers who are here to support you and your family throughout your cancer journey.