Simple and Effective Screening tool for supporting early detection of brain cancer

脑瘤平均会使患者的预期寿命减少20年。2013年在英国：38%的脑瘤患者在确诊前去看医生5次或更多，通常超过15周，因为头痛等症状是非特异性的。尽管头痛与脑癌密切相关，但头痛患者罹患脑癌的几率非常低，这意味着许多忧心忡忡的患者接受阴性的MRI/CT扫描以排除诊断。接受CT/MRI扫描的患者中，真正需要干预/神经康复的患者不到1%。在英国，患者每小时就会患上一个脑瘤，因此开发工具来早期发现脑癌并确保合适的患者能够使用昂贵的CT/MRI基础设施是很重要的。我们的目标是开发一种简单的血液检测方法，用于在GP水平上定量血清GFAP水平，以帮助决策和早期诊断。这将加快诊断速度，降低不必要扫描的成本和焦虑，并减少出现无法手术的大脑瘤的患者数量，从而彻底改变医疗保健。

Brain tumours reduce the life expectancy for an average patient by 20 years. In the UK in 2013: 38 % of brain tumour patients visited their GP 5 times or more, typically over 15 weeks, before diagnosis because symptoms such as headache are non-specific. Although headaches are strongly associated with brain cancer, the chance of a patient with headache having brain cancer is very low, meaning that many worried well patients undergo negative MRI/CT scans to exclude diagnosis. Less than 1% of patients who have a CT/MRI scan actually require intervention/neurorehabilitation. In the UK, a patient develops a brain tumour every hour \[1\], it is therefore important to develop tools to enable earlier detection of brain cancer and ensure the right patients get access to the costly CT/MRI infrastructure.Our goal is to develop a simple blood test for quantifying serum levels of GFAP at the GP-level to aid decision-making and early diagnosis. This would revolutionise care by speeding up diagnosis, reducing costs and anxiety of unnecessary scans and reducing the number of patients presenting with inoperable large brain tumours.