Attention, chocolate lovers: You may not be able to help yourselves. Swiss and British scientists have linked the widespread love of chocolate to a chemical "signature" that may be programmed into our metabolic systems.
Read more health news
Ovarian Cancer Blood Test Appears Promising
MONDAY, Aug. 30 (HealthDayNews) -- Health experts see great promise in an experimental blood test designed to detect ovarian cancer in its early stages. Although the test, which looks for a tumor "fingerprint" of proteins specific to ovarian cancer, is not yet ready for widespread commercial use, it's been hailed as new hope for earlier detection of this potential killer. "It isn't ready for prime time yet, [but] this is the most promising approach to the potential screening of ovarian cancer that we've seen in the last 20 years," said Dr. Robert Morgan Jr., section head of medical gynecologic oncology at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif. When ovarian cancer is caught in the early stages, about 70 percent to 80 percent of patients can be cured, Morgan said. The problem is that there's currently no clear-cut way of catching the disease early enough to treat it effectively. "We don't have any really good way of getting it early," Morgan said. "The majority of patients with ovarian cancer unfortunately come at stage three or four, when their abdomen has already become distended and there's fluid in the belly." Death rates from ovarian cancer have stayed virtually the same over the past two decades, with about 14,000 women in the United States dying from the disease every year, according to the new research, which was just published in Cancer Research. As a result, the holy grail of ovarian cancer research has been to find a blood test that could simply and accurately pick up early traces of a tumor. The new research was funded by the National Cancer Institute and CIPHERGEN Biosystems, which has licensed the test. The study's senior author, Daniel Chan, is director of the Center for Biomarker Discovery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. He's also a consultant to CIPHERGEN, a member of the company's scientific advisory board, and is entitled to a share of royalties on the test. Chan and his colleagues screened 195 blood samples from two groups of patients with ovarian cancer, as well as from healthy women and from women with benign ovarian tumors. The samples were analyzed to reveal proteins that were present at unusually high or low levels in the women who had cancer. This procedure let the researchers identify three proteins or biomarkers associated with ovarian tumors. Chan and his colleagues then looked at the three proteins together and in combination with CA 125, an existing biomarker for ovarian cancer. "There was not a big difference whether we combined them with CA 125 or not," Chan said. "Both of them performed quite well, but we believe that in the future combining might be beneficial." When combined with CA 125, the three protein markers identified cancer 74 percent of the time in patients with early-stage ovarian cancer, vs. 65 percent with CA 125 alone. The two tests together identified 83 percent of the cancers and correctly identified healthy samples 94 percent of the time, versus 52 percent of the time for CA 125 alone. The test will probably never be used for the general population, only for high-risk women. "Ovarian cancer has a relatively low prevalence, about one in 2,500 women, and because of that you need a diagnostic test that is very specific, greater than 99 percent," Chan explained. "If the test is not that specific, it means we're going to have a significant number of women with false positives going to get invasive procedures. We don't want that to happen." Instead, he said, the test will most likely be used to screen high-risk candidates, such as women with family histories of the disease or women who have gone to a doctor or a hospital with a pelvic mass. Either way, the test needs additional validation and is probably several years away from commercial use. "This is some of the most exciting stuff that's come out," Morgan said. "I'm really looking forward to more progress." More information For more on ovarian cancer, visit the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition.
|