Advances in methods to diagnose cancer

According to an article published this month in MIT Technology Review, and thanks to recent advances in medical research, will soon be offering a new analysis technique allows blood to diagnose cancer in the first phase of the disease. This represents a breakthrough in cancer treatment, since in most cases the disease proves fatal in the first phase because the patient has no symptoms and, in many cases, when these begin to appear is because the tumor so widespread that it is too late to treat successfully. 

If doctors were able to detect during the first phase of a malignant tumor, the patient could operate much earlier, and remove the tumor without leaving any remaining cancer cells without resorting to chemotherapy.

Until now, methods do exist to analyze the existence or not of a cancerous tumor has been criticized for not being entirely reliable. The type analysis mammograms, PSA (blood test for prostate cancer) and CA-125 (blood test for ovarian cancer) have a high margin of error. According to David Sidransky, a researcher at Johns Hopkins, the PSA system is wrong 33% of the trials and CA-125 system by 50%.

Thanks to recent research by the expert in cancer cell biology and George Wright a new method that analyzes the structure of proteins in the blood, will theoretically identify a tumor with the clarity and accuracy of a fingerprint.

It is already in the first phase of a tumor; cancer distorts the structure of proteins in the blood, so the ability to monitor the structure and detect any abnormality is a revelation. According to Technology Review, are already doing the first tests on humans of such analysis to detect ovarian cancer while developing other tests for prostate, lung, breast, kidney, liver, and lymphatic leukemia?

In the future, perhaps with a single drop of blood can be tested for all types of cancer and achieve dramatically reduce deaths caused by this disease