One of the main reasons why cancer is regarded as the ‘Emperor of all Maladies’ is because so often it escapes detection. The more insidious (undetectable) a health condition is, the more deadly it’s likely to be.
Late detection is often the major culprit behind poor prognosis and high mortality rates in cancer patients. Often tumours go undetected until they have metastasized i.e. spread to other organs, leading to patients being rendered inoperable or having a poor response to chemotherapy treatments.
Early detection is our best bet to ‘curing’ cancer patients and improving prognosis and five-year survival rates.
A Californian company has come up with a one-of-a-kind test that claims to detect more than 50 types of cancer!
Galleri blood test was run on 5,000 patients with suspicious symptoms. The test was able to correctly detect cancer in several of these patients (85 per cent success rate) along with the original site of the tumour. The survey was led by the University of Oxford, and the results were shared at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago.
According to a report by The , the test detects small fragments of tumour DNA in the bloodstream. This can help the doctors detect cancer as well as the original site.