Improving the quality of life for children with brain tumours

Professor Colin Kennedy and Kim Bull compare the quality of life amongst children with different tumour treatments.

By understanding precisely why some children have a lower quality of life, ways to help these children can be identified.

Colin and PhD student Kim Bull are looking at a specific group of children to determine what reduces their quality of life and how it can be improved.

The children, aged eight to 14, had medulloblastomas or benign astrocytomas in the cerebellum region of the brain. Both groups of children had surgery to remove the tumour, but only the first group also had radiotherapy and chemotherapy. ‘By comparing these two groups we can find out what the effects of this additional treatment are on the quality of life,’ says Professor Kennedy.

Colin Kennedy is a professor in neurology and paediatrics at the University of Southampton and a consultant paediatric neurologist at Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust. He has previously compared two groups of children who developed a medulloblastoma – the most common brain tumour amongst children. Some received cranio-spinal irradiation (CSI) alone whilst others received both CSI and chemotherapy. Children who received both treatments had ‘significantly’ worse health, more behavioural and emotional problems, and a poorer quality of life than those children who received CSI alone.

One challenge is defining ‘quality of life’ itself: ‘It’s affected by lots of things such as health, household income and personal relationships. Quality of life is a funny mixture of clear facts such as your health status and less precise information such as how comfortable you are in social situations,’ explains Colin.

Kim is now collecting and analysing information from families, the children and clinicians for three years to see which quality of life problems are short term and which are long term. She has already found that children with malignant tumours go on to have a worse quality of life than those with benign tumours, whilst both groups have a worse quality of life than children with no tumours at all. That might not sound surprising, but precisely why do these differences exist?

‘Children get tired and their ability to grasp and process information has been affected to different degrees,’ says Kim. ‘A child often has 18 months off school for treatment. They have difficulty integrating back in and the school doesn’t usually have the support that the child needs. Their friends lose interest in them, their balance is compromised and they find it difficult to get around. That’s incredibly tough for a child.’

Kim has also found that the mental health of the child’s parents has a significant effect. But both these findings are good news. They suggest that if a child gets better support at school and the parents get better support in dealing with the family trauma, then the overall quality of life of the child can be significantly improved.