Forget Painful Methods, Now Blood Test to Detect Breast Cancer

Now a simple blood test can diagnose breast cancer. Researchers from the Kansas State University have developed a blood test that can give accurate details of the beginning stages of breast cancer, within less than an hour. It can also detect lung cancer.

The findings come at a time when nearly 226,870 women are affected with invasive breast cancer and about 39,510 die from breast cancer every year. Stefan Bossmann, professor of chemistry and Deryl Troyer, professor of anatomy and physiology are the two brains behind the latest development.

Breast cancer is normally detected during stage 2, when patients start getting symptoms like pain and fatigue.

The findings that help women to diagnose cancer during the early stages are expected to bring new hopes in the breast cancer treatment.

"We see this as the first step into a new arena of investigation that could eventually lead to improved early detection of human cancers," Troyer said, in a news release. "Right now the people who could benefit the most are those classified as at-risk for cancer, such as heavy smokers and people who have a family history of cancer. The idea is these at-risk groups could go to their physician's office quarterly or once a year, take an easy-to-do, noninvasive test, and be told early on whether cancer has possibly developed."

According to 2008 report, nearly 21.1 million (18.3 percent) women smoke in the country compared to 24.8 million men (23.1 percent).

The new test can detect the increased enzyme activity in the body. Samples of urine or blood are mixed with iron nanoparticles coated with amino acids and dye. Health practitioners identify the cancer from the enzyme patterns.

"These enzyme patterns can also help distinguish between cancer and an infection or other diseases that commonly occur in the human body," Bossmann said. "For example, a person who smokes a lot of cigars may develop an inflammation in their lungs. That will drive up some of the markers in the test but not all of them. Doctors will be able to see whether there was too much smoke inhalation or if there is something more serious going on. False-positives are something that we really want to avoid."

The efficiency of the blood test to detect breast cancer was based on the clinical experiments conducted on 20 people with breast cancer, aged between 36 and 81 and a control group of 12 people (aged between 26 and 62 years old).

The results showed the test 95 percent accurate in detecting breast cancer in stages zero and one.

Apart from that, the test also proved effective in detecting lung cancer in stages one and two.