Scientists in the UK have developed a new blood test that could help detect cancer in people who have no specific but more vague symptoms, such as unexplained weight loss or extreme fatigue.

If the test is approved, it will allow him earlier detection of some cancers that are still diagnosed latewhich makes it easier to treat them before the tumor metastasizes, since the test can also show if the cancer has spread in the body.

There is still no clear procedure by which a person with vague symptoms that could be cancer is referred by doctors for further examination. Often the patient is seen by a pathologist or general practitioner who, if unable to diagnose any obvious symptoms, sends the patient home with advice to return if his symptoms worsen.

“The problem in these cases is that if someone does have cancer, it continues to grow, and by the time the patient sees the doctor again, the cancer is often already at a fairly advanced stage,” said lead researcher Dr. James Larkin of Oxford University. This is reported by the British newspaper The Guardian. While it is difficult to estimate how many people fall into this category, it is estimated that there are several thousand in the country at any given time.

The new test uses nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) technology, which detects small molecules, called metabolites, in the blood. Healthy subjects have a different metabolite “profile” than those with localized or metastatic cancer.

The researchers, who published in the American medical journal Clinical Cancer Research, analyzed blood samples from 300 patients with non-specific but alarming symptoms of cancer and found that the test can correctly “catch” about 95% (19 out of 20) of people with cancer.

At the moment, the test cannot distinguish between the type of tumor, but with future improvements, it will be able to do so.

The test is also 94% accurate in distinguishing between local and metastatic cancer. Thus, this is the first blood test that can determine whether a cancer has spread without an accurate diagnosis of what the tumor is. The test will now be tested on more patients (between 2,000 and 3,000) over the next two years before being applied for approval by the relevant UK regulatory authorities.

Source: RES-IPE