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Ajit JainIndia Abroad Correspondent in Toronto
Scientists at St Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton, near Toronto, have devised a new screening test that detects tumours in the earliest stages and has the potential of saving millions of lives.
According to a report in The National Post, Dr John Miller, head of thoracic surgery at St Joseph's, the LungAlert test co-investigator, detected 87 per cent of lung cancers, considered most lethal of all cancers.
"If these numbers pan out, this clearly is the best screening tool to come along in decades -- or ever," Miller is quoted as saying.
When lung cancer is caught in the earliest stages, 70 per cent of the patients can be saved through surgery, but only 10 per cent of patients survive longer than five years if the disease is not caught early enough.
Through the current screening method of chest X-rays, by the time a tumour can be detected, the disease is often too advanced to treat since it may have spread to other organs, said Dr Gerald Cox, a respirologist, also at St Joseph's.
The LungAlert test works by detecting a type of sugar molecule that is produced when a cancer begins to grow.
In their pilot study, it is reported, Miller and Cox asked 75 patients to produce sputum by coughing in a cup. The sample was treated using IMI's test kit, producing a colour reaction, which was read with a colour reader to quantify the results.
The LungAlert detected 20 of 23 confirmed cancers and it found 13 of 15 cancers that were classified in stage 1 or 2 (of four stages), when they are still treatable.
"In fact, early detection could be the biggest impact of any treatment [technique] for lung cancer over the last 50 years," Miller was quoted as saying.
The results of this study are to be presented this week at the American Thoracic Society annual meeting in San Francisco, California.
Lung cancer is considered deadliest. Last year about 17,000 Canadians and 156,000 Americans died of the malignancy, reports say.
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