New blood test to diagnose early stage ovarian cancer
Ovarian cancer is mostly diagnosed at stages three and four when it has advanced too profoundly to be cured.
What you need to know:
- A previous study showed that in 2020, ovarian cancer was the third most common type of cancer globally.
- The risk of getting the disease increased due to age, family history of the disease and breast cancer susceptibility gene.
Outcomes for women suffering from ovarian cancer are set to improve following the development of a new blood test that detects the cancer in its early stages.
The blood test called OvaPrint can distinguish between cancerous and benign pelvic masses with about 91 per cent accuracy, thereby improving the survival rate of affected women, who are often diagnosed when the disease is at advanced stages.
The test, an innovation of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, works by detecting small fragments of DNA shed by the tumour cells into the blood.
“If we can detect high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma in its earlier stages, we believe outcomes will be dramatically improved for women afflicted with this disease. Knowing more about the mass before surgery could point to which type of surgeon and which method of surgery is best for the patient,” said Dr Bodour Salhia, interim chair of the Department of Translational Genomics, Keck School of Medicine.
“It’s all about detecting ovarian cancers at early stages when it is more treatable and the outcomes are significantly better. There are still no effective screening tools for ovarian cancer for use in the general population,” she added.
The scientists are currently following up to validate the test results, and if the outcome is positive, a commercially viable version of the test shall be made available for clinical use within two years or less.
A previous study showed that in 2020, ovarian cancer was the third most common type of cancer globally. The risk of getting the disease increased due to age, family history of the disease and breast cancer susceptibility gene.
Ovarian cancer is one of the most complicated cancers to treat because it is mostly diagnosed at stages three and four when it has advanced too deeply to be cured.
In Kenya, most women are diagnosed at advanced stages of the disease.,according to the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer
Oesophagus cancer is the leading cause of the disease-related deaths in Kenya at 15.6 per cent, followed by cervical cancer at 10.4 per cent, breast cancer (9.6 per cent) and liver cancer (9.1 per cent).
