What are Incubator Days?
Incubator Days are structured, interactive workshops intended to drive the development of a clinical trial. They link up people living with a brain tumour, researchers, clinicians and clinical trials units to produce the best trials proposals, and direct them to the most likely funders.
So far we have held workshops on key themes that we know are important to the brain cancer community:
- Interventions to help caregivers cope
- Best supportive care
- Early diagnosis
- Patient reported outcome measures in studies
Headaches as an indicator of brain tumour
Headaches affect 90% of the population at some time and account for 4% of adult GP visits (Headache Services in England: A report of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Primary Headache Disorders 2014). Most are infrequent headaches that come and go, such as migraine or tension-type headache. These are called primary headaches. There is no underlying structural cause for these. Secondary headache is caused by an underlying medical or structural condition (e.g. brain tumour) and imaging in a must. But it is hard for GPs to distinguish between primary headaches and secondary headaches. They have to base their diagnosis on the clinical history and examination. They then have to consider when to refer for a neurological opinion regarding diagnosis or open access imaging. Many patients with secondary headache will also have subtle cognitive changes or other findings – we call this headache plus.
On 23rd July a group of experts in his field shared the latest research, discussed the challenges around diagnosing a brain tumour when the person presents with a headache, and considered how best to address collaboratively clinical research around headache and clinical presentation of brain tumours.