Neuroblastoma's foes
Researchers seek better, safer treatments for a rare childhood cancer
By Richard Saltus
Brent McCreesh has faced neuroblastoma with the help of his family, care team, and inner strength.
Almost always, when a mother takes her feverish and lethargic toddler to the pediatrician, it turns out to be nothing more serious than a common childhood virus. So Dana McCreesh of Southport, Conn., wasn't overly worried about her 2-year-old son, Brent, when routine blood tests came back abnormal and the doctor referred them to a large teaching hospital 45 minutes away.
It was Sept. 13, 2004. "We had a great life going, and no one in our family had ever been really sick," recalls McCreesh. "At first, I didn't even bother to call my husband, who was at work." But the McCreeshes' "great life" disintegrated when, after several hours of tests including ultrasound and CT imaging, two grim-looking physicians at Yale-New Haven Medical Center broke the news to McCreesh and her husband, Mike, who had just arrived.
"Your son has Stage IV neuroblastoma," the doctors informed them. It was a disease that Dana and Mike McCreesh had never heard of, and not surprisingly, as only 600-800 new cases are recorded each year in the United States. Neuroblastoma is a solid tumor of infants and children that starts in nervous system tissue, often in the adrenal glands inside the abdomen. Some infants are born with the cancer, which forms when cells called neuroblasts fail to mature into nerve cells but instead remain undifferentiated and divide uncontrollably to form tumors.
A neuroblastoma tumor on a toddler's kidney, as seen through a scan
Most cases are diagnosed in children under age 5. About 50 percent of neuroblastomas occur in a fast-growing, aggressive form that spreads to lymph nodes and other organs before causing symptoms that lead to diagnosis. Though some types are easily cured with surgery, nationally only about one-third of the highest-risk patients survive longterm.
Hit with this bombshell, the McCreeshes simply refused to believe the doctors' verdict. "I was sure that after more tests, they'd say it was a mistake," Dana McCreesh recalls. A biopsy (tissue removal and exam) of Brent's multiple tumors, however, stripped away that last hope. From that moment forward, the life of the McCreesh family would be consumed by the disease and its complicated care, both in the hospital and at home. They also have a daughter, Madison, 15 months older than Brent, and Dana was pregnant with another daughter, Kira, at the time.
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