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New Blood Test May Help Detect Ovarian CancerFrom: art fougner, md (evsono@pipeline.com)Wed May 11 12:25:40 2005
WASHINGTON -- A test that looks at four proteins in the blood of women can help to show whether they have ovarian cancer, a rare and deadly cancer that is virtually impossible to screen for now, U.S. researchers said. But they said their test wasn't good enough to use as a general screening test in the population. "This test is able to differentiate healthy individuals from ovarian cancer patients with an overall sensitivity/specificity of about 95%," the researchers wrote this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That isn't accurate enough for a commercial screening test, they said, because it would incorrectly diagnose thousands of women who didn't have cancer, and could miss 5% of those who did. They said it might be useful in women who know they have a high risk -- for instance, women with a family history or with certain types of infertility. "This test should improve our ability to accurately detect premalignant change or early stage ovarian cancer in asymptomatic women at increased risk for the development of ovarian cancer," they wrote. Ovarian cancer will be diagnosed in about 22,000 U.S. women this year and 80% of cases aren't detected until the cancer has spread. That means more than 16,000 U.S. women will die of ovarian cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society. Currently, women are diagnosed based on vague symptoms such as bloating and abdominal pain. A protein called CA-125 is associated with ovarian cancer but predicts only 10% of early stage cases accurately. Women diagnosed earlier have a much better chance of survival because the ovaries can be removed before the cancer has spread. David Ward of the Nevada Cancer Institute in Las Vegas and colleagues tested 86 women for levels of 169 different proteins in their blood. Of the women, 28 were healthy and the rest had ovarian cancer. They found four proteins that, when taken together as a group, had a similar pattern in all the women with cancer. They were leptin, prolactin, osteopontin, and insulin-like growth factor-II. "No single protein could completely distinguish the cancer group from the healthy controls," the researchers said. Tests in a larger group of women showed that if the level of all four proteins fell within a certain range, cancer was present. The test correctly diagnosed 95% of the women with cancer and was correct 95% of the time in showing a woman didn't have cancer. They also want to use their test to see if it can predict other types of cancer. "All of the four biomarkers reported here have been suggested as potential cancer biomarkers by other research groups, although they have never been tested previously as a set," they said. URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111576020640629633,00.html art
-- art fougner, md
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