Another new study has paved way to making better medicine in the future. It was revealed that there might be a way to improve pancreatic cancer diagnoses with a new test.
New Tests Prove Accurate
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult to detect in its early stages, which is also the best time to get treatment. There is new hope though, as a new study describes a blood test that could aid the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. It could also someday make earlier screening easier, Science News reported.
This new test detects a combination of five tumor proteins that appear to be a reliable signature of the disease. Those who took the test and was undergoing pancreatic or abdominal surgery, it was 84 percent accurate at finding out those who have the deadly cancer.
Cancer Biologist Approves Of New Test
Cancer Biologist Raghu Kalluri expressed he was excited about the new study and it also further favors the belief that one biomarker is not enough to successfully identify a disease. With this new test, it would be better at picking out the healthiest patients and the others with pancreatic cancer by putting the five protein biomarkers together.
2017 Estimated To Have More Than 53,000 New Cases
The National Cancer Institute has recently revealed that they estimate in 2017 there will be more than 53,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer in the United States. They also estimate that there will be over 43,000 deaths from this type of cancer.
People who have the most common type of pancreatic cancer, which is called the pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, only have a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent. Symptoms usually appear late with this type of cancer, which includes weight loss and abdominal pain and it does not appear until the cancer spreads more. Unfortunately, the current imaging technology cannot detect this type of cancer from the very beginning.
New Discovery Might Be The Secret To Combat Pancreatic Cancer
In another new study, it showed that studies in mice with a KRAS mutation indicate that expressing only half the amount of the glucose-regulated protein GRP78 was enough to stop the early stages of pancreatic cancer development. The KRAS mutation is 90 percent present in pancreatic cancer patients as well. Reducing the amount of this type of protein showed that it delayed the development of the cancer and prolonged survival, Science Daily reported.
Check out the Early Warning Signs Of Pancreatic Cancer video below:
