New Blood Test Can Predict Future Breast Cancer

A new blood test can predict future cases of breast cancer, opening new doors to better prevention and early treatment of the disease.

"The method is better than mammography, which can only be used when the disease has already occurred. It is not perfect, but it is truly amazing that we can predict breast cancer years into the future," Rasmus Bro, a professor of chemometrics in the Department of Food Science at University of Copenhagen, said in a press release.

It should be noted that the new method has been tested only for a single population and needs to be validated more widely before it can practically be used to predict breast cancer - one of the most common cancers in women around the world.

Nevertheless, this blood test could create a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of breast cancer as well as other diseases.

"The potential is that we can detect a disease like breast cancer much earlier than today. This is important as it is easier to treat if you discover it early. In the long term, it will probably also be possible to use similar models to predict other diseases," added Lars Ove Dragsted, who was involved in the research.

So how exactly did researchers develop this new blood test? What they did was analyze all compounds a blood sample contains instead of - as is often the case - examining what a single biomarker means in relation to a specific disease.

"When a huge amount of relevant measurements from many individuals is used to assess health risks - here breast cancer - it creates very high quality information. The more measurements our analyses contain, the better the model handles complex problems," Bro explained.

While the new method doesn't reveal anything about the importance of the single biomarkers in relation to breast cancer, it does show the importance of a set of biomarkers and their interactions.

"No single part of the pattern is actually necessary nor sufficient. It is the whole pattern that predicts the cancer," said Dragsted.

When someone is in a pre-cancer state, apparently how certain compounds (metabolites) in our blood are processed changes. (Scroll to read on...)