Can assessments of brain cancers be done with cerebrospinal fluid? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When someone is thought to have a brain tumor procedures to make the diagnosis may be risky or invasive, so a new test developed by Chetan Bettegowda, director of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and colleagues is a welcome addition to tests used for diagnosis and monitoring.

Bettegowda: The work that we published is an attempt to understand what's happening in the brain without the need to perform invasive brain biopsies. Accessing the brain and spinal cord is more challenging than almost any other part of the body because it's housed in these structures of the skull or the spinal column and even the simplest of biopsies ends up actually being a neurosurgical procedure done in the operating room, with real risks. How do we follow treatment, how do we establish a diagnosis without the need to do surgery?                      :31

The test samples cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, which surrounds the brain and spinal cord, looking for DNA from the tumor in addition to assessing immune response. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.