(Ivanhoe Newswire) – A new blood test could help identify patients that have lung cancer. The blood test could save patients from undergoing more invasive procedures to find out if they have the deadly disease.

CT scans are often used to detect lung cancer, but they have a very high false positive rate. This leads to a patient having more scans or even a biopsy to find out if they have cancer. Researchers from Duke University Medical Center have identified four markers in the blood that can help identify if a patient has cancer or not.

For the research, study authors compared the levels of the four protein markers in the blood of almost 100 patients known to have cancer and in 100 patients without cancer. They say individually these markers are all associated with cancer, but when isolated they are not strong enough to indicate cancer. However, when you look at all four together, researchers were able to determine if a patient had cancer 80 percent of the time.
 

“We talk about how devastating this disease is all the time, but we still don’t have a screening system in place that can detect lung cancer early, without exposing patients to the risks of biopsy and surgery,” say Edward Patz, Jr. MD, lead investigator. “This study is an important step in the right direction.”

Lung cancer is the leading killer in men and women with nearly 160,000 of the 175, 000 diagnosed patients dying each year. Most patients are diagnosed after the disease has spread, making the need for early detection techniques.

SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2007