You’ve heard it before: the best ways to prevent cancer are to avoid tobacco, eat a healthy diet, maintain a healthy weight, avoid excessive alcohol and sun exposure, and exercise regularly. Those are duties that we all, in fact, must perform if we want to maintain our health, but did you know that there is a study that says that the breast cancer Could it be detected 5 years before it appears?
Beyond these basic lifestyle habits, in fact, doctors also recommend regular screening for common cancers to detect changes in your body that could turn into cancer if left untreated.
While there are some well-established screening tests, such as colonoscopies, mammograms, and Pap tests, researchers at the University of Nottingham Medical School may have developed a new blood test capable of detect breast cancer up to 5 years before symptoms are present.
immune surveillance
Before continuing, it’s important to understand how your body detects cancer cells on its own. Normally, a healthy cell will grow and divide for a period of time until it dies. A cancer cell continues to grow and divide until it eventually forms a tumor.
Tumors produce proteins on their surface called antigens. These tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) are recognized by your body as “non-self” or foreign, and your immune system will be constantly monitoring them to detect and destroy them.
How does your body destroy these foreign invaders? TAAs cause your body to make antibodies against the cancer cell, known as autoantibodies. This process is known as immune surveillance and indicates that your body is capable of mounting a protective response against cancer cells.
Detect breast cancer through blood
Researchers of the University of Nottingham are harnessing this body’s natural immune response to detect breast cancer.
The team took blood samples from 90 patients with recent diagnosis of breast cancer and compared them with samples from a control group of 90 patients who did not have cancer. The goal was to find out if they could detect the presence of specific autoantibodies and find out if they had been activated by tumor antigens.
The results were positive.
“We were able to detect cancer with reasonable accuracy by identifying these autoantibodies in the blood,” said Daniyah Alfattani, a member of the Nottingham team of researchers.
This means that using a simple blood test, the researchers were able to identify the body’s immune response to AATs and this may allow them to detect cancer significantly earlier than conventional tests.
What’s next?
While these initial results look very promising, other researchers caution against getting too excited just yet. Cancer epidemiologist and professor at the University of CambridgePaul Pharoah reminds us that this is very preliminary data.
“Much more research would be needed before any claim can be made that this is likely to represent a significant advance in early cancer detection.”
After the success of these initial tests, the researchers are now testing a sample of 800 patients against nine AATs, and they hope that the results will be even more precise with this increase in the size of the participants.
If these tests turn out well, the team hopes that a cancer-screening blood test will be available in the next four to five years.
other types of cancer
When cancer is detected earlier, it is easier to treat and the survival rate is significantly higher, and the results of this study are not only promising for breast cancer screening.
Similar tests are currently being done for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and liver cancer. This list represents 70 percent of all cancers worldwide and could be a breakthrough in cancer research.
So while this research is still new, we could be one step closer to a cancer-free world.