Tag: Brain tumour

BNOS 2022: Where do people with primary malignant brain tumour die?

 

At the end of June 2022, I had the chance to present my work at the British Neuro-Oncology Society (BNOS) Conference, in partnership with the Computational Oncology Laboratory. Now that I am back from Liverpool, where the conference took place, I thought to write quick a summary of my analysis on the end-of-life care for patients diagnosed with a primary brain tumour in England between 2013 and 2018.

Every year, 12,000 new cases of brain tumours are diagnosed in the UK, making brain tumours the 9th most common cancer. Prognosis is often inauspicious, with only 12% of patients surviving 5 years or more.

Research on end-of-life care is rare and the national picture is even rarer. We know that usually people with cancer prefer to die at home, although this is not always the case, and a high number of patients continue to die in hospital or hospices. We are interested in understanding what factors affect the location of death and if having treatment within a few months before death affect the location of death.
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The cost of treating adult glioblastoma patients in England (2013-2018) – BNOS

I have just given a talk about our work at the BNOS conference in Liverpool, and thought I should write something about the work we have been doing.

The GlioCova project has data on the patient demographics, tumour demographics, and the treatments received (chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and neurosurgery) of 50,000+ adult patients diagnosed with a primary brain tumour between 2013-2018. We specifically have information on the inpatient and outpatient NHS admissions in HES tables of these patients from 3 months before diagnosis (the end of 2012) and follow-up data after diagnosis (up to the end of 2019). Using this rich and detailed patient-level dataset as well as software publicly available from the NHS (HRG4+ Reference Costs Grouper), we provided comprehensive up-to-date estimations of the secondary care costs of cranial glioblastoma patients. My work was the first attempt to estimate the treatment and care costs of the commonest primary malignant brain tumour in a multi-year whole population cohort in England.

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