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Blood Test Could Save Lives of Thousands of Women

A NEW blood test could save thousands of lives by helping to spot ovarian cancer before the main symptoms develop, according to new research.

Ovarian cancer is responsible for the deaths of nearly 5,000 women a year in Britain and has been called the "silent killer" because it is usually advanced and hard to treat by the time symptoms appear.

The new test has the potential to save lives by allowing identification of the disease at a stage when it can be effectively treated. But, with an accuracy of 95 per cent, it is still not precise enough to be used in national screening programmes.

At present there is no way to detect the disease reliably at an early, curable stage.
Just under 7,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year in the United Kingdom and a large proportion - almost 4,700 - will die of the disease. It kills more than 300 women a year in Scotland.

The new test was developed by scientists in the United States led by Dr Gil Mor, from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. It relies on four marker proteins, whittled down from an initial list of 169. The four - leptin, prolactin, osteopontin and insulin-like growth factor II - identified cancer with 95 per cent accuracy in a test group of more than 200 women.
Each of the proteins had previously been suggested as a possible cancer biomarker. But, in the study, no protein on its own could completely distinguish cancer patients from healthy participants.

The findings were reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers pointed out that the test would have to be improved before it was good enough for national screening, which required an accuracy of at least 99.6 per cent...

EDWARD BLACK from The Scotsman