Scientists at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute have used the Epigenetic principal of methylation to develop a new blood test capable of more accurately predicting almost any cancer.
Epigenetics holds that metabolic changes in the body cause more methylation around your ball of DNA in the cell. This methylation can form cluster blocking messages from genes. This theory is in direct contrast to the Somatic theory of cancer, upon which the great majority of orthodox medicine for cancer is based, particularly the old fashioned notion that chemotherapy is needed to kill off theoretical mutations (sequence changes) inside the DNA. Many scientists now believe such sequence changes rarely occur in cancer.
Now scientists at Dana-Faber have used modern thinking to develop a cancer diagnosis test. Dr. Geoffrey Oxnard, the lead author on the research confirmed this. “Our previous work indicated that methylation-based assays outperform traditional DNA-sequencing approaches to detecting multiple forms of cancer in blood samples.”
The researchers took 1530 blood samples from known cancer patients with all types of cancer, and 2053 from people presumed to be healthy. Over 20 types of cancer were involved including breast, prostate, lung, colorectal and pancreatic cancers.
The tests were shown to be 76% accurate in detecting people with the disease, way in excess of any other such test to date. The test was more accurate the later the stage of cancer, and it was even able to specify the organ involved. It only gave a false positive reading in only 0.6% of test subjects.
Go to: Nutritional Testing in Cancer