Neuroblastoma is a type of cancer that afflicts babies and children. The malignant tumor grows in their nerve tissue, causing fever, general illness, and pain at first, then a loss of appetite, weight loss, diarrhea, and vomiting. The children may also have problems with movement and balance, as well as difficulty breathing, coughing, red skin, pale skin, bluish skin around the eyes, lots of sweating, and a fast pulse, depending on the site of the tumor.

Eventually, the children often die.

Sometimes though, treatments work.

Treatment

The conventional way of attacking the cancer is to remove it surgically. Usually, doctors also add chemotherapy and even radiation therapy to the mix. It usually depends on where the cancer is.

The growth commonly occurs in the adrenal gland, the spinal cord, or chest initially, from where it spreads throughout the bones, liver, lymph nodes, skin, and around the eyes.

To locate the cancer, doctors use X-rays, bone scans, CT scans, and MRIs.

Prognosis

Some children are very lucky and their cancer just goes away without treatment. For others, treatment works. And for others still, the disease does not respond to treatment, they grow a second tumor, or another type of cancer will occur a bit later in life.

Because the prognoses differ so greatly case to case and a lot of it depends upon how early the cancer is caught, it isn't very useful to speak in percentages. However, neuroblastoma - which makes up 7% of all child cancer cases - is common enough that 650 new cases are diagnosed each year. That's why research groups like St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital are constantly looking for new treatments.

Breakthrough

Despite modern medicine's best attempts and many promising discoveries, no new treatments have emerged that significantly increased survival rates until recently.

One such new treatment has made big waives amongst oncologists, specifically pediatric oncologists.

While the chemotherapy drug isotretinoin has been used for a while because it is known to be, by itself, the most effective treatment for Neuroblastoma, doctors with the Children's Oncology Group have found that, by combining it with immunotherapy biological agents, they can improve survival rates by 20%.

Immunotherapy biological agents use the body's immune system to provide a boost to isotretinoin's cancer-fighting abilities. The immunotherapy uses ch14.18, a monoclonal antibody, and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factors and interleukin-2, which are both cytokines, cell-signaling protein molecules.

Ch14.18 targets cancer cells like a guided missile, it is often said. Instead of heat, the guide is a substance that appears on the surface of those cancer cells. The cytokines regulate immune responses to the therapy.

Over half of the patients in the study that received only isotretinoin had a relapse - basically a death sentence. For those who received the new combined treatment, only 34% suffered a relapse.

Isotretinoin

Isotretinoin has long been used in the treatment of cancer. However, it is known more commonly perhaps as an acne treatment.

Known better as Accutane, its brand name, Isotretinoin is the acne drug that doctors send in when nothing else will work.

The unique thing about Accutane is that it stops the acne from forming rather than directly attacking the bacteria. Sometimes common drugs like Accutane do uncommon things.