WENDY SHERMAN: Glioblastoma is the most common malignant tumor of the brain. But in comparison to other cancers that are out there, it's pretty rare. I think it's estimated that 3 out of every 100,000 people are diagnosed with it in the United States each year. Usually, the symptoms are related to the location in the brain where the tumor is located. So if the tumor is located in the part of the brain that controls your language, then you might have trouble reading, writing, speaking. Headache as the only presenting sign of a tumor, especially a glioblastoma, is exceptionally rare.
The way to diagnose it is with an MRI of the brain with and without the contrast dye. We're doing a lot of research looking at are there markers in the blood, are there markers in the urine, spinal fluid. Where can we find some indication that this could be starting to happen in the body? But right now, there's no screening test for this.
The first step is what we call maximally-safe resection, meaning you take out as much as you can of the tumor safely. That reduces the pressure, can improve symptoms, and also, establishes a diagnosis, tells us for sure, yes, this is a glioblastoma. Standard of care is a combination of radiation and chemotherapy. And the radiation is delivered to where the tumor was. It's not the whole brain. It's to a limited area. And then once radiation is over, people are maintained on the chemo pill.
And then there's also a device that you wear on your head. It's called tumor treating fields. It's alternating electric fields. And the way it works is it affects how cancer cells are dividing. So essentially, it pulls them apart, and they divide incorrectly. And the cancer cells recognize that they divided incorrectly, and then they undergo what's called apoptosis, or they kill themselves. People tend to live between a year and a half and two years with this on average. Between 5% and 10% of people are alive at five years. We want our patients to live, and we want to be able to cure this, and that's what a lot of our research is going toward at this time.
Once you've had a brain tumor and you've had surgery in the brain, radiation to the brain, it affects you in a different way than cancer in the rest of the body. People's personalities can be different. Survivorship is different in that you may not be the same person you were at the beginning of this. There's a lot of services to help people adapt to what we call the new normal. We have a lot of where we'll meet people initially, they get the treatment locally, and then they see us with each MRI, and they just have the MRI sent to us, and we do a video visit, show them the MRI, and say, yeah, you're on track, things are working, keep going, or no, we need to change gears.
We have so many trials that are in various stages of opening. But on the website, you'll be able to see all the different trials, and it will tell you is it open at Jacksonville, Rochester, Arizona, all three. And then there is a number on that web page, too. And if you call, you'll be set up with the research coordinator, and they can talk to you as well and say, yeah, we have this trial that's open, or we might have some other trials we could consider you for. And that can help get people in as well.
We're redesigning our trials now so you learn as you go. If you learn as you go that it's not helpful, well, you can stop and switch, and then you're not exposing people to treatment that's not going to help them. So I'm excited about how we're designing them and what we're testing as well. We're coming together as a community to treat this. We're getting more patients on trial. We're being smarter about our trials. I think it's an exciting time for our field, and I'm very hopeful that we're going to make progress on this.