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Currently, we don’t really understand why some children get a brain tumor. The only true risk factor that we know of is radiation, but radiation is only responsible for a small number of patients. Therefore, we need to improve our understanding of why some children get brain tumors. One way of doing so is by looking for rare little errors with huge effects in genes. We already know that some of the errors (also called mutations) come with a higher chance of developing cancer. Mutations in specific genes (such as TP53) have already been associated with increased risk, and we confirmed this in one of our studies.
However, we think that these rare mutations only explain a small portion of the children that get glioma. We are looking at other potential risk factors such as more common mutations, environmental exposures such as pollution, and social economic status and how these factors influence each other. We believe that looking at these risk factors together may improve our understanding of why some children get brain tumors. This understanding may help us to come up with a way of preventing brain tumors or providing better therapies.