“Have You Been to Oscar’s?”: Neurocognition and Radiation Toxicity With Jona

The Accelerators (Drs. Matt Spraker and Simul Parikh) host radiation oncologists Dr. Jona Hattangadi-Gluth and PGY-5 resident Dr. Austin Hopper. Jona is a central nervous system malignancies expert, co-lead of the Central Nervous System Disease Team and Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at UC San Diego.

In this episode, we discuss Jona's lab's work in understanding the link between brain tumors, radiation (and other) treatments, and neurocognitive toxicity.

We start by discussing Austin's recently presented work that developed an normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) model for radiation dose and attention/processing speed. 

Later, we discuss specific methods used in the NTCP work. How can this work be translated to clinical counseling and practice? 

Also, Matt argues that building NTCP models based on neurocognitive outcomes, such as attention or fine motor control, can be more difficult to model than more simple clinical outcomes such as pneumonitis.

Here are some links to things we discussed during the show:

• Connor et al., 2023. Fine Motor Skill Decline After Brain Radiation Therapy—A Multivariate Normal Tissue Complication Probability Study of a Prospective Trial
• Unnikrishnan et al., 2021. Phase II Clinical Trial of Image-Guided Cognitive-Sparing SRS in Patients With Brain Metastases
• Oscar's Mexican Seafood, Oncology Twitter's favorite fish tacos in San Diego.

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