Belgian Boy Becomes First Child Cured Of Rare Brain Tumour (image: Unsplash/Milad Fakurian)
In an exceptional medical breakthrough, a 13-year-old becomes the first child in the world to have been cured of Brainstem Glioma, a peculiar type of brain tumour. Lucas, Belgian boy, was diagnosed with Brainstem Glioma at the age of six.
The doctors said that there was no doubt of the prognosis. French doctor and head of the brain tumour programme at the Gustave Roussy cancer centre in Paris, Jacques Grill remembers the time when he had to inform Lucas’s parents that their son was going to die. “Lucas beat all the odds” to survive, Grill said.
The full name of the tumour is diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). It is identified every year in around 300 children in the United States, and up to 100 in France.
As the International Childhood Cancer Day falls on Thursday, the medical community praised the improvements made in the survival rate of Brainstem Glioma. As per the reports, 85 percent of children now survive more than five years after being detected with cancer.
Generally, the outlook for children with this brain tumour was bleak; most do not live a year beyond the prognosis. Only 10 percent were alive two years on, a recent study observed.
Though Radiotherapy, at times, can slow the rapid advancements of the tumour, no drug has proven effective against it.
In order to join the BIOMEDE trial which tests potential new drugs for Brainstem Glioma, Lucas and his family travelled from Belgium to France. From the beginning, Lucas responded strongly to the cancer drug everolimus, which he was randomly allotted.
“Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumour completely disappeared,” Grill said.
However, the doctor did not stop the treatment routine – at least until a year and a half ago when Lucas disclosed that he was no longer taking the drugs anyways.
“I don”t know of any other case like him in the world,” Grill added. How Lucas was fully recovered, and how his case going to help other children like him in the future, need to find out. Seven other children in the trial survived years after being diagnosed, but only Lucas’s tumour completely vanished, the AFP reports.
(With inputs from AFP)
