Blood test predicts future breast cancer risk

A blood test can predict the chances of a woman developing breast cancer within next two to five years with a sensitivity of 80 per cent, scientists say.

The blood test could create an example shift in early diagnosis of breast cancer as well as other diseases, researchers said.

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

A metabolic blood description describes the amounts of all compounds in our blood.

The scientists measured participants’ metabolic blood profiles for the study.

When someone is in a pre-cancer state, the pattern for how certain metabolites are processed probably changes, researchers said.

The scientists used the 20-year-old blood samples and other available data from 400 women who were healthy when they were first tested but who were diagnosed with breast cancer two to seven years after providing the first sample, and from 400 women who did not develop breast cancer.

The method was also used to test a different dataset of women examined in 1997. Predictions based on the new set of data matched the first dataset, which indicates the validity of the model, researchers said.