Anne Li January 20th, 2018
A new blood test that could ‘help detect eight common cancers before they spread’ is big news today. There’s lots of excitement around the study behind the headlines, published in Science. And rightly so. It marks an important next step for scientists working on blood tests for cancer. But some important details were skipped over in the discussion in the news. The first thing to know is that this experimental test is a long way off being used to diagnose cancer. As some experts have said, it’s “promising but with several caveats and a significant amount of further research is needed”. And that’s because using a blood test to confirm that people with cancer have cancer is very different to using that same test to detect the earliest hints of cancer in otherwise healthy people.
See original article at: https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2018/01/19/a-routine-blood-test-for-cancer-would-be-fantastic-todays-news-isnt-it/