Common genetic variations spread across five genes raise a person's risk of developing the most frequent type of brain tumor, gliomas, an international research team reports online in Nature Genetics.

A new Mayo Clinic study found that patients with low-grade gliomas survived longest when they underwent aggressive surgeries to successfully remove the entire tumor. If safely removing the entire tumor was not possible, patients survived significantly longer when surgery was followed by radiation therapy.

Childhood brainstem gliomas (BSGs) are rare but can be very difficult to treat successfully and they tend to have poor survival rates. However, a team of Spanish researchers have found that a chemotherapy regimen of irinotecan and cisplatin (I/C) produced rapid clinical responses and shrank the tumours by more than 20 percent in all six children enrolled in a clinical trial.

Gliomas are highly malignant and invasive tumors with tendrils that extend far from the primary tumor site, rendering conventional therapies ineffective and leading to an invariably poor prognosis.

A vaccine for treating a recurrent cancer of the central nervous system that occurs primarily in the brain has shown promise in preliminary data from a clinical trial at the University of California, San Francisco.