In this page, an overview of the most common brain tumour symptoms will be addressed, as well as a brief explanation of possible risk factors and conditions that could derivate into a brain tumour.
Symptoms
Not all types of brain tumours cause symptoms, and not all cause the same. These symptoms can be caused by two main reasons:
- The tumor is pressing or encroaching on other parts of the brain and keeping them from functioning normally.
- Swelling in the brain caused directly form the tumor of for surrounding inflammation
The most common symptoms are: headache, weakness, clumsiness, difficulty in walking and seizures. Also there are non specific ones such as: vomiting, abnormalities in vision and difficulty in speech. However, non of these symptoms are brain tumour characteristic (click here to learn more about who to diagnose a brain tumour). Therefore a further diagnostic testing is needed to ensure the presence of a tumour. Usually the appearance of these symptoms is gradually and easy to be missed, even though in some cases the tumour can be suddenly manifested, for example in a stroke.
The recommended cue to seek for medical attention is when the following events are detected:
- Unexplained and persistent vomiting
- Double vision or unexplained blurring, specially on only one side
- Lethargy
- New seizures
- New pattern or type of headaches.
The location of the tumour is the highest determinant of the symptoms a patient experiences. There are over 120 types of brain tumours, and thus it is extremely complicated to determine the tumour type just by the symptoms the patient suffers. Moreover, the presence of the brain tumour can be due to a metastasis of a cancer originated in other part of the body.
Symptoms related to the tumour location:
- Pressure or headache near the tumour.
- Loss of balance and difficulty with fine motor skills is linked with a tumor in the cerebellum.
- Changes in judgement and muscle weakness or paralysis is associated with a tumor in the frontal lobe of the cerebrum
- Partial o complete loss of vision is caused by a tumor in the occipital or temporal lobe.
- Changes in speech, hearing, memory or emotional state, and problems understanding or retrieving words can be caused by a tumor in the frontal or temporal lobe of the cerebrum.
- Altered perception of touch or pressure, arm or leg weakness on one side of the body, or confusion with right and left sides are linked to a tumor in the frontal or parietal lobe.
- Inability to look upwards can be caused by a pineal gland tumor.
- Lactation, alteration in the menstrual period and growth in hands and feet are associated to a pituitary tumor.
- Difficulty in swallowing, facial weakness or numbness, and double vision are symptoms of a tumor in the brain stem.
- Vision changes including partial loss and/or double vision can be caused by a tumor in the temporal or occipital lobe, or in the brain stem.
To know more about the tumour types, please click here, and how are they graded here.
Location of Different types of brain tumours [3]
Risk factors
Risk factors concerning diseases can be divided into environmental, behavioral and genetic risk factors. The first two are complicated to study and can change at different states of life. Moreover, non specific risk factor in these two groups has found to be brain tumour determinant. Smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, exposure to carcinogens or radiation, puberty and aging, are risk factors that may lead to a brain tumour, but as well as any other disease or type of tumour. Therefore, genetic risk factors are more suitable for studying as they are stable in time and could be more disease specific.
According to current research [4] , very few genetic conditions have been found to be risk factors for brain tumour. These kind of tumours can be often associated with several familial cancer predisposition syndromes, such as Li-Fraumeni syndrome, neurofibromatosis, tuberus sclerosis and Turcot's syndrome. In these syndromes, the patient inherits a germline mutation in a tumour suppressor gene. The tumour initiates when the remaining copy of the tumor suppressor is mutated or silenced, giving rise to cells with a growth advantage. Because this process requires the accumulation of multiple mutations in cells, these individuals have an increases tumour risk because all the cells carry an initial mutation.
Furthermore [4] , recent studies showed that brain tumours can cluster within families. Familial clustering can be due to either genetic and environmental factors, as families often share common environmental exposures in addition to common gene.