A study looking at a new system to pick up and treat cancer pain in people with head and neck cancer

This study looked at a new system for picking up and treating pain sooner in people with head and neck cancer.

If you have cancer, it is possible that you may have pain. Tumours do not have nerves of their own, but a growing tumour can press on nerves nearby, causing pain. If you have cancer that has spread to another part of your body or started to grow into the surrounding tissue, it is more likely that you will have some pain. But cancer pain does not affect everybody. Doctors will be able to treat most people’s cancer pain successfully. But sometimes, this pain can be difficult to treat.

We know from research that pain after surgery really improved after doctors changed how they dealt with it. For example, they would more regularly ask about pain and so be able to treat it earlier and monitor it more closely.

Doctors in this study used and tested this approach when caring for people with head and neck cancer. They called this system ‘screen and treat’. So rather than waiting for a patient to tell the doctor about any pain they had, they asked the patient regularly. They could then start pain treatment at an earlier stage, which is when it works best. The aims of this study were to

• See how well the screen and treat system worked for cancer pain

• Look at the costs of doing this related to how well it worked