This blood test can detect cancer years before symptoms appear
Last edited Fri Jul 24, 2020, 04:13 AM - Edit history (1)
By Chris Smith @chris_writes
July 24th, 2020 at 12:14 AM
Almost 635,000 people lost their lives battling the novel coronavirus, of the nearly 15.48 million cases, as of Thursday morning. Millions more will be infected and thousands will continue to die. Add to that the millions of people who are unemployed, and you end up with only a partial picture of the complicated mess that 2020 has been. But there is good news in all this darkness, both when it comes to COVID-19 and other illnesses.
The latest noteworthy medical development concerns cancer, as researchers have devised a test that can detect several types of cancer up to four years before symptoms appear. If accurate, such a test could help in diagnosing some of the most common types of cancer and prepare the patient and their physicians for treating the illness.
An international team of scientists published a new study in Nature Communications, explaining that their assay could diagnose stomach, esophageal, colorectal, lung, and liver cancer with the help of a single blood sample. The results could be available up to four years before the patients start developing symptoms.
“What we showed is: up to four years before these people walk into the hospital, there are already signatures in their blood that show they have cancer,” University of California bioengineer Kun Zhang told Scientific American. “That’s never been done before.”
More:
https://bgr.com/2020/07/24/cancer-symptoms-panseer-blood-test-stomach-esophageal-colorectal-lung-and-liver/
