Professor Kennedy’s paper published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics

The paper is about the effect of altering the way of giving radiotherapy on quality of survival in children treated for medulloblastoma, the commonest malignant brain tumour of childhood. This was a major piece of work over the last 10 years and was undertaken in the context of a European randomised controlled trial.

Results showed that compared to the standard method of giving radiotherapy as one small dose per day, Hyperfractionated radiotherapy, which involves giving two very small doses per day eight hours apart, appeared to lead to an improvement in the child’s executive function, which is the child’s ability to use their faculties to plan, make decisions, and use their attention and memory to find solutions to problems. It did however also decrease the child’s growth by reducing growth in the vertebrae so that the spine typically ended up shorter. Both the improvement in executive function and the decrease in spinal growth were more clearly apparent in children whose brain tumour was diagnosed before they were eight years old.

Professor Kennedy comments, “This study is part of a wider body of work which acknowledges that it is not enough to establish simply whether children are alive after successful treatment of a brain tumour. It is also important to look at their health and well-being and the extent to which they can participate fully in life both as children and also in their later adult lives. These are such major issues for childhood brain tumours that many of the current studies of treatments for them are focused on reducing the unwanted late effects of treatments rather than trying to use more aggressive treatment to increase survival rates which are already quite good with more than 70% of all children in whom a brain tumour is diagnosed now becoming long term survivors.”