Treatments 
 
 Thoughts Can Fuel Some Deadly Brain Cancers 
 
 The simple act of thinking can accelerate the growth of many brain tumors. 
 
 That's the conclusion of a paper in Cell published Thursday that showed how activity in the cerebral cortex affected high-grade gliomas, which represent about 80 percent of all malignant brain tumors in people. 
 
 "This tumor is utilizing the core function of the brain, thinking, to promote its own growth," says Michelle Monje, a researcher and neurologist at Stanford who is the paper's senior author. 
 
 In theory, doctors could slow the growth of these tumors by using sedatives or other drugs to reduce mental activity, Monje says. But that's not a viable option because it wouldn't eliminate the tumor and "we don't want to stop people with brain tumors from thinking or learning or being active." 
 
 Even so, the discovery suggests other ways to slow down some of the most difficult brain tumors, says Tracy Batchelor, who directs the neuro-oncology program at Massachusetts General Hospital and was not involved in the research. 
 
 i itoggle caption Steve Fisch/Courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine Steve Fisch/Courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine 
 
 "We really don't have any curative treatments for high-grade gliomas," Batchelor says. The discovery of a link between tumor growth and brain activity "has opened up a window into potential therapeutic interventions," he says. 
 
 The discovery came from a team of scientists who studied human glioma tumors implanted in mouse brains. The scientists used a technique called optogenetics, which uses light to control brain cells, to increase the activity of cells near the tumors. 
 
 The team wanted to know whether this high level of activity would make the glioma grow more quickly. "And it turns out that it did," 
 
 The discovery of a link between tumor growth and brain activity is a byproduct of Monje's career-long quest to help to help children with a rare and deadly form of brain cancer. 
 
 The cancer is called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. Monje saw her first case when she was still in medical school. "I cared for a little girl who had diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma and I was just so struck by our failure to treat this disease," she says. 
 
 DIPG strikes about 200 children a year, often at around age 6. It can't be treated with surgery because the tumor cells become entwined with healthy cells in the brain stem. Children with DIPG typically live about nine months after they are diagnosed. 
 
 "This is a disease with a terrible prognosis," Monje says. "And it's one that unfortunately we haven't been able to touch with interventions for decades." 
 
 Monje wanted to change that. So after receiving her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford in 2004, she began studying DIPG tumor cells as well as the part of the brain in which they grow, the brain stem. 
 
 She began to suspect that this cancer was somehow hijacking a process called myelination, which happens in the brains of healthy kids. Myelination creates a layer of insulation around nerve fibers, which allows them to carry signals more quickly and efficiently. 
 
 Last year, Monje and a team of researchers showed that the cells responsible for myelination began to grow rapidly in response to high levels of brain activity. "That was an intriguing finding and it was consistent with our idea that activity in the brain, thinking, planning, using your brain, might be promoting the cancer arising within it," she says. 
 
 The mouse experiment confirmed Monje's suspicion. Another experiment showed that the glioma cells were indeed growing in response to the chemical signals that usually lead to myelination. 
 
 One striking finding, though, was that the link between brain activity and tumor growth wasn't limited to DIPG, the rare childhood tumor Monje had been studying since medical school. Her team found that a range of deadly gliomas grow faster when they're near highly active nerve cells. 
 
 "This work has much broader implications for brain tumors," says Batchelor. "It's not just pediatric tumors, it's pediatric and adult. And it's not just one particular type of glioma. This has potential implications across the entire family of gliomas in the brain." 
 
 Batchelor says Monje's research suggests a new way to slow down these tumors — by interrupting the pathways linking brain activity to tumor growth. 
 
 Monje says she is encouraged that her work has led to a better understanding of DIPG and other deadly childhood tumors. But she says it's still hard to feel gratified. 
 
 "It will be gratifying when we make some difference for these kids," she says. ||||| A woman in Spain who suddenly became very religious and believed she was speaking with the Virgin Mary turned out to have a brain tumor that appears to have caused her symptoms, according to a new report of the case. 
 
 The 60-year-old women was said to be a happy, positive person who was not particularly religious. But over a two-month period, her friends and family noticed changes in her personality and behavior. She appeared sad and withdrawn, and also showed increasing interest in the Bible and other sacred writings, the report said. 
 
 The woman started spending hours during the day reciting religious writings. She also had mystical experiences, in which she reported seeing, feeling and talking with the Virgin Mary, the report said. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life] 
 
 Those close to her thought the woman might be experiencing depression, because she was caring for a relative with cancer at the time. 
 
 However, when her doctors performed an MRI, they saw several lesions in her brain. After taking a biopsy from one of the lesions, doctors diagnosed the woman with glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. 
 
 The tumors were too large to treat with surgery, so the woman received chemotherapy and radiation for the cancer. Her doctors also prescribed antipsychotic drugs for her, because some studies have suggested this class of drugs may have an anti-cancer effect on glioblastoma. 
 
 During the woman's five-week treatment, her religious visions gradually disappeared, the report said. 
 
 In this patient's case, "it is clear that the religious experience represented a fracture" from her prior behavior that was "not preceded by a gradual change in her thinking and acting," the researchers, from the Hospital General Universitario Morales Meseguer in Murcia, Spain, wrote in their paper, published online Dec. 12, 2016, in the journal Neurocase. "Nor was there any kind of trigger or reason [for the behavior change] except for the disease, and hence, it can be considered a clearly pathological experience," they said. 
 
 It's not clear how often people experience "hyper-religiosity" or other behavior changes as their first symptom of a brain tumor, the researchers said. One review found that up to 22 percent of all brain tumors may first appear along with psychotic symptoms. 
 
 From this one case, it's not possible to pinpoint the part of the brain responsible for the women's religious experience, the researchers said. But, they note that the right temporal lobe, a brain region that has previously been linked to the development of mystical experiences, also appeared to be involved in the woman's case. 
 
 The researchers also said that, before the woman's extreme religious behavior, she did believe in God, so this "was not a case of religious conversion." 
 
 The woman's condition quickly declined — she experienced a stroke two months after she started treatment, the report said. Eight months after her cancer diagnosis, she died due to the progression of her tumor. 
 
 The researchers also suspect that, before her cancer diagnosis, the patient may have experienced non-convulsive seizures, possibly as a result of her brain tumor. They suspected this because of particular changes they saw in her brain scan. Some cases of hyper-religious behavior have also been reported in people with epilepsy, according to the report. However, the researchers were unable to perform tests to confirm the epilepsy diagnosis. 
 
 Original article on Live Science.
– Thoughts can be deadly. So posits new research published this week in the journal Cell investigating the link between brain activity and tumor growth. Specifically, researchers at Stanford found that activity in the cerebral cortex promoted the growth of high-grade gliomas; they account for four out of every five malignant brain tumors, and a Stanford press release notes survival rates for those with the cancer have barely budged in the last three decades. To test the suspected link, the researchers implanted human glioma tumors into the brains of lab mice and then used light to increase brain-cell activity adjacent to those tumors. That increase did spur faster tumor growth, and the behavioral relationship—in which an organ's "primary function" fuels a tumor—is an unusual one. As lead author Michelle Monje puts it, "We don't think about ... breathing promoting the growth of lung cancer." Monje has spent more than a decade studying diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, which exacts a cruel toll: It typically strikes around age 6, and it afflicts some 200 American kids each year; most are dead within nine months. (Earlier this month, the New Jersey Record shared the story of a family who donated 6-year-old Lily LaRue Anderson's tumor to Monje's team upon the girl's death; her battle with DIPG lasted 11 months.) A neuro-oncologist not involved in the study tells NPR that Monje's findings have "potential implications across the entire family of gliomas in the brain ... not just pediatric tumors" and could lead to new treatments. Monje tells NPR one route that's not an option: using sedatives to reduce brain activity. "We don't want to stop people with brain tumors from thinking or learning or being active." (Will tiny balls of gold help improve cancer treatments?)