Elevated levels of three proteins detected in urine of early-stage pancreatic cancer patients
MONDAY, Aug. 3, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Scientists report that they have developed a urine test that may detect pancreatic cancer at an early stage. The findings were published in the Aug. 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.
For the study, funded by the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, a British charity, researchers analyzed 488 urine samples, including 192 from patients with pancreatic cancer, 92 from patients with chronic pancreatitis, and 87 from healthy individuals.
Of the 1,500 proteins found in the urine samples, the research team focused on three: LYVE1, REG1A and TFF1. The team found that patients with pancreatic cancer had elevated levels of all three proteins compared with healthy patients and patients with pancreatitis. Using all three proteins, they were able to detect early-stage pancreatic cancer more than 90 percent of the time.
The team is hoping to do further tests on urine samples from people at high risk to further validate their findings. “If this test proves to be as good as we hope, we could make an important difference and enable early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer completely noninvasively, using urine samples,” lead researcher Tatjana Crnogorac-Jurcevic, M.D., Ph.D., of the Centre for Molecular Oncology at Barts Cancer Institute of Queen Mary University of London, told HealthDay.
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