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

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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.