A BREATHYLIZER TEST FOR OVCA

Going out to dinner

 

It is abundantly clear that a means to detect the presence of early-stage ovarian cancer accurately, non-invasively, and cheaply would be an inestimably boon to womankind – as it says on the back of the MRC symptom card, “when detected early, over 90% of women survive (ovarian cancer)”.  To my disappointment, the suspicion has inexorably grown on me (an untutored outsider, remember) that the approach used by the Fred Hutch group I try to help isn’t working.  Looking for specific cancer-related miRNA molecules has been suggested, but no follow-up has been done, to my knowledge.   I have also read that it may be possible to actually detect cancer cells circulating in the blood stream.  Again, where that has gone or is going is a mystery to me.  Cancer-sniffing dogs have been mentioned more than once: would that it were so.  Now, another possibility:

http://www.separationsnow.com/details/ezine/14c226d1e62/Journal-Highlight-Assessment-of-ovarian-cancer-conditions-from-exhaled-breath.html?tzcheck=1

This paper deals with a method to (possibly) detect the presence of ovarian cancer by looking for certain organic molecules in a woman’s  breath.  How it is done shouldn’t concern us: we don’t have the background to translate all that biochemistry.  Suffice it to say that one breathes into a thing, and bells, whistles and lights do or do not go off.  This test was performed on a sample of 182 women, some of which had OVCA, most of which did not, and some had something called “benign gynecological dysplasia”.  The statistics were encouraging:  sensitivity, 79%; specificity, 100%; accuracy, 89%.  What was not discussed was how early this test might catch the disease. Obviously, you can’t test women with stage 1 OVCA unless you know they have it –and that is difficult to do.  Ultimately, a test that detects the disease in late stage 3 will be of little overall value.  Let’s hope this breathalyzer thing is more sensitive than that!

More work is, of course, needed.

By the way – this seems to be a definite international research effort:  Israelis, Chinese, people from Spain and Greece – but, curiously, no Americans.

Also:

Sensitivity: the probability that, if a test says you have something, you really do

Specificity: the probability that, if a test says you don’t have something, you really don’t.

Accuracy: I don’t know what in hell this is.  I guess it is some murky statistical measure of how likely the test is to be right.  If Jay Teachman read my blog, he could explain.  But he doesn’t.