A new screening method could detect twice as many cases of ovarian cancer as current technologies.
The groundbreaking new technique uses statistical calculations to interpret changes in levels in a women's blood of a protein called CA125, which is tied to ovarian cancer, University College London reported.
The method offers a more accurate way to predict a woman's risk of developing cancer, and can detect ovarian malignancies in 86 percent of women with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer (iEOC), current methods have an accuracy of only about 45 percent in these patients.
The recent study looked at 46,237 women who continued to attend annual multimodal screening following the initial screening. They provided blood samples once a year, which was measured for CA125 levels and then a computer algorithm was used to interpret their risk based on factors such as age and original protein levels.
"There is currently no national screening [program] for ovarian cancer, as research to date has been unable to provide enough evidence that any one method would improve early detection of [tumors]. These results are therefore very encouraging. They show that use of an early detection strategy based on an individual's CA125 profile significantly improved cancer detection compared to what we've seen in previous screening trials," said professor Usha Menon, UKCTOCS co-principal investigator and trial ccoordinator at UCL, who has led the implementation of this 14 year trial.
Past large ovarian cancer screening trials have used a fixed cut-off for CA125 to identify risk, but some women can have high levels of the protein and not have cancer, while others have low levels and significant abnormalities.
"A blood test to find women at risk of ovarian cancer is an exciting prospect, but this work still needs to be tested in women to see if it can save lives. By tracking how the levels of the CA125 protein change over time we might have an early signal to detect [tumors]. Ovarian cancer is particularly hard to spot at an early stage so it's vital that we find ways to diagnose the cancer sooner," said James Brenton, Cancer Research UK's ovarian cancer expert.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
