Why do gliomas keep recurring

Everyone is familiar with the disease of glioma. There are many people suffering from it. When patients undergo treatment and remove glioma, it recurs not long after. Many patients and their families are very confused. Why does it recur after the operation? Many patients and friends find it difficult to understand the recurrence of glioma. Let's find out why glioma keeps recurring.

Glioma is the most common malignant tumor in the brain, accounting for about 40% of intracranial tumors. The World Health Organization divides the pathological types of gliomas into four levels, among which grade I is benign glioma, grade II is low-grade malignant glioma, and grade III-IV is highly malignant glioma. Unfortunately, grade I gliomas are rare, while grade IV gliomas account for 50% of gliomas.

Regardless of whether it is a low-grade glioma or a highly malignant glioma, most patients will have relapses after a long or short period of time. If the patient is in good physical condition and the site of recurrence and the range of the tumor allow surgery, the best treatment for recurrent glioma is still surgery! With conservative treatment after surgery, the survival period and quality of life are much better than conservative treatment alone (no surgery).

Gliomas of grades II-IV will recur. Many patients find it difficult to understand the recurrence of gliomas. They think that the doctor has removed the tumor and said that it was removed very cleanly, so how can it recur? In fact, the degree of thoroughness of glioma removal is relative. Generally speaking, doctors remove the tumor visible to the naked eye during surgery, which is considered clean. However, due to the characteristics of glioma's infiltrative growth, some tumor cells are mixed with normal brain tissue and look like normal tissue, which will deceive the doctor's eyes. Therefore, doctors sometimes expand the scope of resection and remove part of the seemingly normal surrounding tissue of the tumor. However, even so, they cannot prevent the recurrence of malignant gliomas. The reason is that the degree of infiltration of malignant glioma cells is beyond the imagination of ordinary people. Since brain tissue is functional and does not allow arbitrary resection, the scope of expanded resection is ultimately limited. Moreover, even if one hemisphere with a tumor is completely removed, a glioma may still grow in the opposite hemisphere.

Surgeons have limited ability to treat this behavior of gliomas, so they can only resort to radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Practice has shown that radiotherapy and chemotherapy do significantly delay the recurrence of malignant gliomas, but they still cannot cure gliomas. It is generally believed that these measures cannot eradicate residual infiltrating cells.

In short, the reason why malignant glioma recurs is mainly due to its invasive growth characteristics. At present, surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy cannot eradicate the residual latent tumor cells. Even so, once patients find abnormalities, they still need to go to relevant specialist hospitals for examination and treatment in time. At the same time, we believe that in time, humans will have more effective measures to prevent its recurrence.