If your brain tumour comes back

Some brain tumours will be completely cured with the first round of treatment. Others will come back at some time after they were first treated. Depending on the treatment you had at first, it may be possible for your specialist to give you further treatment to try to control the tumour once again.

Even if it is not possible to cure the tumour, further treatment may keep it under control for longer and control the symptoms of the tumour.

It may be possible for you to have more surgery. This is a decision that has to be made individually. It will depend on

• The type of tumour you have
• The size of the tumour
• Whether the tumour has spread within the brain and spinal cord
• How fast it is growing
• Your general health

In some situations it is not likely that surgery will help - for example if there are several new brain tumours. Or if the tumour is now growing quite quickly, it may not be worth putting you through further brain surgery because the tumour is likely to grow back very quickly afterwards.

It may not be possible to have more than one course of radiotherapy. This is because radiation damages healthy tissues. There is a limit to how much they can withstand. Usually, you will have been given an amount very near this limit the first time round. Further treatment to the same area is likely to cause too much damage to your healthy brain tissue. But if the tumour grows back in a different part of your brain, it may be possible for you to have another course of radiotherapy treatment.

Sometimes targeted radiotherapy such as stereotactic radiotherapy can be given to areas that have already had radiotherapy for particular types of tumour.

Chemotherapy is often kept in reserve in case a brain tumour comes back (recurs). So it is often possible to have this treatment for a recurrence. Even if you have had chemotherapy treatment before, there may be another drug you can try.

The first way to control your symptoms will be with treatment - surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy will reduce the size of the tumour and ease the pressure that is causing the symptoms.

If you have had all the treatment you can have, it will still be possible to help relieve your symptoms. They can nearly always be controlled to some extent. Steroids will bring down the swelling inside the head. This will help ease headaches, sickness and drowsiness. You can also take painkillers, including morphine, to help with headaches.

You will probably also have medicine to help control fits (seizures). Your specialist may recommend this even if you have never had a fit. Fits are quite common with advanced brain tumours. And it is better to prevent them from happening as they can be scary for both you and for anyone who is with you.

There is information about living with an advanced brain tumour in this section of the website.

You may want to ask your doctor about taking part in a clinical trial. New treatments are often being tried and there may be a trial suitable for you. There is a chance that the trial treatment may control your brain tumour for a while longer. But you must remember that clinical trials are testing treatments. It is tempting to assume that any new treatment must be more effective than the existing ones, but unfortunately this is not always the case. Make sure you understand what going into the trial will mean. 

In our trials and research section, there are pages explaining all about clinical trials, including what clinical trials are and how to find a trial.  If you are interested in finding out about clinical trials running at the moment, click on 'brain tumour trials' on the left hand menu of any page in this section.  You could also ask your specialist if there is any trial that they know of that is suitable for you.