Single Drop Of Blood Will Soon Be Enough To Diagnose Most Types of Cancer

[OnlinePoker]

We can hope:

Researchers at the VUMC Cancer Center Amsterdam have developed a ground breaking technique that can detect different types of cancer at an early stage from a single drop of blood.

Current cancer detection methods usually rely on scans and tissue biopsies, which are time consuming, difficult and often expensive. CT scans for example can only detect relatively large tumors that are usually in advanced stages. The ability to detect cancer in the blood, also called liquid biopsy, is a major advantage for the early diagnosis and detection of cancer cells.

http://www.thelatestnews.com/single-drop-of-blood-soon-enough-to-diagnose-most-types-of-cancer/

[valerief]

1. I wonder if this will be OTC in 2020.

Although this it is still in an early experimental phase, Tom’s team is currently working on a fast, cheap and usable blood test for public use that is expected to be available by the year 2020.

[lpbk2713]

2. I've heard some dogs can detect cancer in humans.

Maybe there's some common bond here?

[smirkymonkey]

3. This is amazing. Catching the disease in the early stages can make all the difference in

one's chances of recovery.

[pnwmom]

5. They're already finding out that millions of women may have had unnecessary

treatment for Stage 0 breast cancer.

This may just open another Pandora's box of putting people through painful and debilitating treatment for early cancers that may never have amounted to anything in the long run.

[OhZone]

11. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

A medical friend of mine was saying people probably fight off a lot of cancers and never even know they have them. Oh well.

[pnwmom]

4. Except they will still have no idea which cancers would have never turned into something

that should be treated.

[Logical]

7. So you can have cancer cells in your blood without having cancer? nt

[pnwmom]

8. You can have cancer cells in your blood without having cancer that needs to be treated.

You can have tumors in your body that will go away on their own, or grow so slowly that they never cause any damage.

This is just a blog post, but it's written by a cancer biologist who has had cancer himself. And it ties in with a lot of other information out there about possible over-diagnosis of cancer patients with new technologies.

http://www.science20.com/confessions_stem_cell_scientist/why_literally_everyone_has_cancer_and_what_means_you-81937

As we develop during embryogenesis and childhood and even later in life simply as we live or especially if we are sick or injured, our trillions of cells have to be replaced so there are stem and progenitors that are constantly dividing to fulfill this need.

One cell becomes two, two becomes four, and pretty soon you have millions of cells that are all derived from one stem cell. Along the way, mistakes are inevitable and it is unfortunate that essentially all mistakes that tend to make a cell more prone to become cancer give this cell an evolutionary advantage over its neighbors. You can also imagine the danger if a stem cell happens to be the one that gets mutated and passes that mutation along to millions of progeny.

We do not think about it, but the reality is that cells compete with each other inside of us. There is a kind of micro version of "survival of the fittest" and natural section going on inside of us as though we were mini-Earths....and the winners are pre-cancerous cells. These pre-cancerous cells on a potential path to become full-blown cancer are the winners of the evolutionary race inside of us because they grow faster, are less likely to die, and avoid differentiation far more than their normal neighbors.

What this means is that an axiom of cell biology is that the more cancer-like a cell is, the more that cell will tend to have its offspring cells over-represented in our bodies over time, which is of course a very bad thing.

So why don’t we get clinically apparent cancer even more often?

[Logical]

12. Thanks pnwmom, Interesting. Learned something today!! nt

[kcr]

16. Except it's not true

I don't know who that is in that source, but it's baloney. Not everyone has cancer cells in them.

[kcr]

10. The article states they can determine if the cancer had metastasized

So, I don't think that's the case.

[pnwmom]

14. Clearly a cancer that had metasticized would be a serious cancer.

But that doesn't mean that every non-metasticized cancer would need to be treated.

[kcr]

15. But non-metastacized cancer does need to be treated

Are you under the impression that doctors wait for it to metastasize, or that they should? Because that isn't the case.

[WestSeattle2]

6. This is awesome. I doubt it will cause unnecessary treatment; I think

it will alert physicians to a problem that needs to be monitored. If it turns out the body takes care of the mutated cells on its own, problem solved. If monitoring detects the body needs help, then treatment will begin. But the monitoring can begin in the earliest of stages, when something can be done if needed.

[pnwmom]

9. We are probably already having over-diagnosis of breast and prostate cancers.

It stands to reason that the same problem could occur with other cancers -- people being treated with painful and debilitating treatment who have slow-growing cancers that might never have caused a problem.

[Snobblevitch]

13. I don't know if this is a good thing or not.

There needs to be a way to determine the severity of the cancer or the likelyhood that a full blown canerous disese will develop.