General Incident Rates

Data from Cancer Research UK shows that in Britain, during 2009, invasive brain tumour diagnosis was given to 4,987 people. Non-invasive brain tumour diagnosis occurred for 4,347 people, of which 3,409 were benign. In 2010, there were 3,889 deaths from invasive brain tumours and 995 deaths from non-invasive brain tumours, of which 380 were benign. In fact, in the period 2001 - 2005, there were 32 deaths per million population from these conditions. Estimates from the UK’s 2011 census show that Great Britain’s population was just under 60 million by 2005. Using 32 deaths per millions of population, in the UK in 2005, approximately 1,900 lives were lost to brain tumours. If we suppose that these figures are also valid for a worldwide population of around 6.5 billion, then during that same period, nearly 206,000 people died from a brain tumour. That’s a staggering amount of suffering.

Whereas leukaemia treatment has improved dramatically, unfortunately, the same cannot be said for brain tumours. Hence, by the 1990s, brain tumours had become the most common cause of childhood cancer deaths in the UK. In fact, in Britain, more people under the age of 40 die from a brain tumour than any other cancer.