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Blood Test May Signal Breast Cancer Earlier; Doctors Hope It Leads to Quicker Treatment

Posted on: Monday, 25 April 2005, 15:00 CDT

A simple blood test could help identify breast cancer earlier, a new Medical College of Wisconsin study shows.

However, experts say much more research is needed to determine whether it could replace mammograms or lead to new treatment options for women with the disease.

"Good tumor markers are hard to find," said James A. Stewart, an oncologist and professor of medicine at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Plenty of them have been tried over the years, but most are not terribly sensitive and many are not very specific (for a particular cancer)," he said.

The small study, which was presented at last week's annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Anaheim, Calif., identified seven substances that were significantly increased in women with known breast cancer, compared with those women undergoing breast reduction surgeries. The substances included those formed during the inflammatory response and tissue repair.

One substance, mammaglobin B, was only found in the breast tissue of women with cancer. However, the others PPAR-alpha, TNF-alpha, NFkB, II-6, MMP-9, Skp2 and NFKB had levels that differed and were dependent on the patient's specific diagnosis.

"These results demonstrate the ability of these molecular signatures to differentiate malignant tissue from normal tissues and the usefulness of immune cells in detection of cancer," the authors concluded.

"This test, in the future, will be able to detect cancer in individuals when it is at a point that we can best treat it," said Ashwani Khanna, an associate professor of medicine at the Medical College and author of the study.

Khanna said the blood test could help doctors monitor cancer progression or regression once a patient has been diagnosed.

However, the technique used by the authors is too preliminary and is still a "long way off" from becoming a diagnostic tool, Stewart said.

Yearly mammograms for women age 40 and older are still considered the "gold standard" for cancer screening.

However, they do have their own drawbacks, including an inability to detect cancer in 15% to 25% of cases.

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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