Blood Test For Ovarian Cancer

Main Category: Ovarian Cancer
Article Date: 10 May 2005 - 9:00 PDT

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Researchers have developed a blood screening test that could help catch ovarian cancer in its early stages, when few symptoms are present.

Ovarian cancer, the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths in the U.S. and 3 times more lethal than breast cancer, is usually not diagnosed until its advanced stages. Clinicians currently have no sensitive screening method because the disease shows few symptoms in its early stages.

David Ward and colleagues developed and tested a 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 range, the test will predict that a tumor is present. In a test group of more than 200 healthy women and women with ovarian cancer, the test showed 95% sensitivity (fraction correctly diagnosed with cancer) and 95% specificity (fraction correctly diagnosed as cancer-free). Each of the proteins had been previously suggested as an accurate cancer biomarker, though not as a set. In this study, no single protein could completely distinguish the cancer patients from healthy control individuals.

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