Blood Test for BC--Out-of-the-box thinking

Blundin2005

I put this out there for the nerdy ladies here like me who are curious and ask questions and enjoy finding responses.

Imagine a blood test for breast cancer!  I just finished my annual check ups last week.  My chest was squashed (how flat was it?!) and it hurt...especially the one that had surgery.  The ultra sound was more tolerable except for the trans vaginal ultra sound.  I hate that one!  I loath that one!  And I told the doc that I hate and loath it almost every five minutes.  The good news is that the results were all in my favor 4 1/2 years post diagnosis and treatment.

My cancer was found early.  But I sure would like to get to this finding with a little more style and grace!  The anxiety waiting for the answer will never change I suspect.  And the treatments tuned to the individual would be most welcoming!  I like everything about the possibilities of this blood test. Maybe they'd tag into the test our vit D levels, and metabolism rates, etc.

I respect your critical eye and wondered what you think about it. 

I took these quotes from the Discussion section of the paper. 

"Screening tests for the early detection of cancer is universally accepted to reduce cancer mortality.  Nevertheless, careful optimization is required because an inordinately high false-positive rate will cause unnecessary diagnostic work-ups."

"The data is promising for the development of a cost-effective, serum-based screening assay." 

Let's not kid ourselves, money drives research and development for our health, but science drives the people who thought their way through this puzzle.  

Here's where you can find the paper.... 

http://mcr.aacrjournals.org/content/early/recent 

Here's the abstract.... 

Next Generation Sequencing of Serum Circulating Nucleic Acids from Patients with Invasive Ductal Breast Cancer Reveals Differences to Healthy and Nonmalignant Controls
Abstract
Circulating nucleic acids (CNA) isolated from serum or plasma are increasingly recognized as biomarkers for cancers. Recently developed next generation sequencing provides high numbers of DNA sequences to detect the trace amounts of unique serum biomarkers associated with breast carcinoma. Serum CNA of 38 women with ductal carcinoma was extracted and sequenced on a 454/Roche high-throughput GS-FLX platform and compared with healthy controls and patients with other medical conditions. Repetitive elements present in CNA were detected and classified, and each repetitive element was normalized based on total sequence count or repeat count. Multivariate regression models were calculated using an information-theoretical approach and multimodel inference. A total of 423,150 and 953,545 sequences for the cancer patients and controls, respectively, were obtained. Data from 26 patients with stages II to IV tumors and from 67 apparently healthy female controls were used as the training data set. Using a bootstrap method to avoid sampling bias, a five-parameter model was developed. When this model was applied to a validation data set consisting of patients with tumor stage I (n = 10) compared with healthy and nonmalignant disease controls (n = 87; 1,261,561 sequences) a sensitivity of 70% at a specificity of 100% was obtained. At a diagnostic specificity level of 95%, a sensitivity of 90% was calculated. Identification of specific breast cancer-related CNA sequences provides the basis for the development of a serum-based routine laboratory test for breast cancer screening and monitoring. Mol Cancer Res; 8(3); 335-42

Best wishes to all as always,

Marilyn 

Margerie

even better, how about a mouth swab test???

They are working on it for assessing risk of bc before diagnosis, hoping it will eventually be accurate enough to diagnose a primary or recurrence.

google: mouth swab breast cancer (can't copy and paste at the moment...)

Blundin2005

Margerie--Yes it seems the science is coming in leaps and bounds.  If I understood the links correctly, the test is used as a risk evaluation before diagnosis.  The swab test would raise awareness of life style implications combined with genetic predisposition.

The blood test in the study posted targets diagnosis of invasive BC for early detection thus early treatments.  Now we wait to hear more about the treatment side of this targeted and personalized equation.

"Never run faster than your guardian angel and fly"

Marilyn