10 May, 2005 01:21 GMT
Epithelial ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths in the United States and three times more lethal than breast cancer.
Connecticut researchers say a new blood screening test could help identify ovarian cancer in its early stages when few symptoms are present.
A team from the Yale School of Medicine, in a study summarized in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, developed and tested a new blood test for ovarian cancer based on four proteins: leptin, prolactin, osteopontin and insulin-like growth factor-II.
If the level of two or more of these biomarkers for a patient falls within a certain warning area, the test will predict that she has cancer. In a test group of over 200 ovarian cancer patients and healthy women, the test showed 95 percent sensitivity (fraction correctly diagnosed with cancer) and 95 percent specificity (fraction correctly diagnosed as cancer-free).
Each of the proteins had been previously suggested as a good cancer biomarker, though not as a set. In this study, no single protein could completely distinguish the cancer patients from the healthy controls.
Epithelial ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths in the United States and three times more lethal than breast cancer.
© 2005 United Press International. All rights reserved.
© 2005 Daily News Central. All rights reserved. |
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