Progress is being made in the field of research on brain tumors. In fact, three new studies are being released today and have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

German researchers focused on the treatment of medulloblastoma, which typically strikes children. Normally, these tumors are treated with surgery, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. This method of treatment is often successful, but for very young children, the radiation sometimes causes learning disorders.

Researchers wanted to learn what the survival rate would be for children under the age of three who were not treated with radiation. They looked at 43 patients who had brain cancer that had not spread to other areas of the body. They were treated with surgery and chemo, but not with radiation.

After five years, two-thirds of these children had survived, surpassing the average survival rate of 25 percent. Further, the children who were not radiated, tested higher on standard IQ tests than those who received radiation.

Another study, led by researchers from the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer and the National Cancer Institute of Canada, reported on the effects of the drug temozolomide on adults suffering from glioblastomas with favorable results. Of those who were given this drug in combination with radiation, 26 percent lived two years or more, as opposed to 10 percent of the patients who were treated only with radiation.

Lisa DeAngelis of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is encouraged by this development noting that this is the first study indicating that chemotherapy is beneficial for patients with brain tumors. But it has been difficult, if not impossible to predetermine which patients will respond to chemo.

A third study may offer some answers to that conundrum. Researchers at University Hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland believe that those for whom temozolomide does not work may have a gene that facilitates the cancer cells to regenerate after treatment. If these cells grow back, the patient will not recover. If doctors could isolate this gene, they would know which patients would benefit from treatment.

Until then, however, the Swiss researchers agree that all patients should be given temozolomide.