Can brain lymphoma be cured?

When brain lymphoma occurs, not only the brain is affected, but also the spinal cord and intracranial nerves will be affected. Moreover, this is a relatively rare tumor. After the onset of the disease, patients need to undergo corresponding examinations and then cooperate with treatment through surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and other methods. After multiple treatments, the disease can be controlled and recovered.

The formal name of brain lymphoma should be:

"Primary central nervous system lymphoma" mainly occurs in the brain parenchyma, but the spinal cord, cranial nerves, etc. can also be affected. It is a relatively rare disease, accounting for about 1%-4% of intracranial tumors. However, data show that the incidence of brain lymphoma has increased significantly recently, and people should be vigilant. Most of the cases occur in people aged 60-65 years old, and most of them are men. 90%-95% are diffuse large B-cell lymphomas, with a tumor proliferation index of often >50% and a high degree of malignancy. The course of brain lymphoma is often very short, and symptoms of intracranial hypertension such as headache and vomiting usually appear at an early stage. Since the tumor can appear in any part of the brain, different symptoms may appear depending on its location.

CT and MRI examinations can reveal lesions with uniform enhancement and irregular morphology. Since these imaging manifestations are not specific to brain lymphoma, they need to be differentiated from other brain diseases such as glioblastoma and metastatic tumors. The method for confirming brain lymphoma is pathological diagnosis. When brain lymphoma is suspected clinically, a directed puncture biopsy or frozen biopsy during craniotomy is often performed. When brain lymphoma is more certain, complete tumor resection is generally not performed. After brain lymphoma is confirmed, a whole-body PET-CT is often recommended to determine whether there is any extracerebral involvement.

Treatment for brain lymphoma includes surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Surgery is only used for biopsy, including craniotomy or directional puncture. However, when the condition worsens rapidly in a short period of time and brain herniation or pre-brain herniation occurs, tumor resection can be performed to decompress the tumor. Chemotherapy is mainly based on methotrexate. Large doses of methotrexate (>1.5g/m) can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. As a basic drug for brain lymphoma, it is often combined with cytarabine, alkylating agents, nitrosoureas and temozolomide. Intravenous corticosteroids can also significantly shrink brain lymphomas, but the tumor will recur after stopping the drug. A radiation dose of 36-45Gy during radiotherapy can significantly shrink the tumor, but it is not currently recommended to be used in combination with high-dose methotrexate, and many people do not use radiotherapy as the basic treatment for brain lymphoma.

The median survival time of brain lymphoma with active and regular treatment can reach more than 60 months.