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Doctors can more effectively treat many brain tumors by first ascertaining their genetic characteristics, rather than studying tissue samples under a microscope, the standard practice, two teams of researchers reported last week.

The findings could alter diagnosis and treatment decisions for thousands of patients, experts said, and mark an important advance in so-called precision medicine, in which cancer treatments are customized according to the genetic makeup of the patient’s tumors.

“Prognosis is going to be more accurately delineated by these kinds of genetic subtypes, outstripping the value of looking through a microscope,” said Dr. David J. Langer, the chief of neurosurgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, who was not involved in the research.

Some 23,000 Americans develop a brain tumor each year, and about 14,000 die of one annually. The two reports, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, focused on gliomas, which account for roughly a third of brain cancer cases. Some gliomas become aggressive, like the cancer that recently killed Beau Biden, a son of Vice President Joe Biden.

In the new studies - one coordinated by the National Institutes of Health, the other led by the Mayo Clinic and the University of California, San Francisco - research teams performed multiple genetic analyses on 1,380 tumors. Both teams found that the tumors could be grouped into a few categories, which could be determined by looking at a handful of genetic glitches.

Tumors with one genetic profile, for instance, were relatively slow growers and responsive to drug treatment, making them good candidates for chemotherapy alone, rather than combined with radiation. Tumors in another category grew relatively slowly but were not as responsive to drugs, suggesting that combined therapy was best.

And those in a third category were nascent aggressors, for which the prognosis is usually dim. But catching those tumors early will at least give families time to enroll in experimental trials, the researchers said, and will give patients and their families more specific guidance on which treatments and trials may be most suitable.

Brain tumor’s genetic makeup critical in treatment