Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the Brain Tumour Research report on National Research Funding, published in October 2016, if he will make an assessment of the reasons for the 40 per cent increase in brain tumour diagnosis in the North East between 2011 and 2014.

These are matters for the local National Health Service.

Public Health England advises that the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) collects data on all primary cancers diagnosed in England. The report from Brain Tumour Research shows that there were 241 brain cancers diagnosed in the North East in 2014, and NCRAS data shows that there were 210 diagnoses in 2011.

NCRAS recommends that changes in cancer incidence are only compared using an age-standardised rate to ensure differences in the underlying population and changing age structure of an area are taken into account. The age-standardised rate of brain cancer incidence in the North East in 2014 was 9.5 per 100,000, and in 2011 was 8.4 per 100,000. As the number of new diagnoses is relatively small, it is not possible to say that any differences over time, or between the North East and the England average, are outside of that expected by random variation.