Currently, only five cancer screening tests are available for patients in the United States; this includes tests for prostate, lung, breast, colorectal and cervical cancers. They each have limitations, including varying levels of invasiveness, discrepancies in use across clinical practice and high false-positive rates, which can lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
There are several cancers which are considered “high mortality” for which there is no screening available at the moment which end up causing people to needlessly suffer from a disease that may very well have been preventable.
That’s all about to change.
The study evaluated the performance of the test in two cohorts: individuals already diagnosed with cancer (n = 2,823) and those without a cancer diagnosis (n = 1,254). It detected cancer signals from more than 50 types of cancer across all four stages of the disease.
- The test’s overall sensitivity across cancer types and stages was 51.5%; sensitivity increased with each stage – the more advanced the disease, the more sensitive the test.
- The average rate of sensitivity in cancers stage I – III was 67.6% in 12 pre-specified cancers (anal, bladder, bowel, esophageal, stomach, head and neck, liver and bile-duct, lung, lymphoma, ovarian, pancreatic, and cancers associated with white blood cells), which account for almost two-thirds of cancer-related deaths in the US.
- The test’s specificity (also known as the false-positive rate) was 99.5%, meaning that it found a false signal for cancer in only 0.5% of those tested.
- In 88.7% of cases, the test correctly identifies the tissue in which the cancer was located, which could help decrease the time to diagnosis and allow physicians to facilitate treatment with greater efficiency.
This demonstrates that a simple blood test could be effective for diagnosing several cancers. For a full list of the 50 cancers that can be identified – click here to see the full article.