Mary Tyler Moore Brain Surgery
MALVEAUX: Mary Tyler Moore is having elective surgery on her brain. Many of you know her as the woman who could turn the world on with her smile. Her publicist says the actress has a slow growing brain tumor that's fairly common and benign. So I asked our chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta why the 74-year-old might have opted for surgery.</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Suzanne, it's not that unusual for these tumors not to be operated on, at least immediately. And the reason is because they're typically thought of as benign tumors. If they're also small, the discussion between doctor and patient may be, look, let's keep an eye on this. There's a chance that you may not need to have any therapy for this in your entire lifetime. And so you get yearly scans, MRI scans, and check to see, is this tumor starting to change. The tumor may have been found incidentally. So someone goes in for an unrelated issue and they find this tumor and that's when this whole discussion starts to take place. The tumor, as you mentioned, a meningioma, really is a tumor sort of on the -- located on the outside of the brain typically. So growing from the outside in, sort of pushing into the brain as opposed to growing within the substance of the brain. And, again, it's found -- it has a very characteristic look when you get an MRI scan. Now the big question a lot of people ask then is, why operate now? Mary Tyler Moore is 74 years old. It really comes down to three basic reasons, or at least one compelling reason of those three. The tumor could have started to grow quickly. So year to year maybe it was unchanged or it was growing very slowly and all of a sudden on a scan you see a more explosive rate of growth. Two is that the tumor may be changing to some extent. So it looked like a benign tumor, but now on scans something's changed about the tumor that makes it look like it may be becoming more malignant. And, three, as you might guess, is that it's starting to cause some symptoms. Starting to cause numbness or weakness on one side of the body. Starting to cause blurriness of vision. If those things are starting to happen and they're related to the tumor, that might be a reason to operate as well. If the tumor is entirely removed, which it often is, oftentimes nothing else needs to be done. If it's not entirely removed, a patient may need radiation therapy afterwards to sort of address the remaining tumor. But that's a little bit of an idea of what's probably been happening with Mary Tyler Moore over the last several years, and, of course, most recently. Suzanne, back to you.</s>MALVEAUX: Thank you, Sanjay. CNN NEWSROOM continues right now for Randi Kaye who's in for Ali Velshi.