Medical Breakthrough! Saliva Tests Will Determine If You Have Breast Cancer!
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by Swan | January 17, 2008 at 11:33 am 2676 views | 29 Recommendations | 6 comments
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Thoughts of washing have left your mind as you take a deep breath and try to remain calm. Your trembling hand moves in slow but firm circular motion, as the water pours over you - and you try not to deliberately avoid the area where you first felt the lump.
This is every woman's fear, though it's not strictly a women's disease. Men get breast cancer too. And not only men and women - but dogs too. Vets even recommend spaying dogs before their first heat in order to protect our precious pets from contracting breast cancer in later life.
In 2006, the American Cancer Society estimated that 212,920 new cases of invasive breast cancer would occur - and of those, 41,970 people would die. That's a horrifying number!
According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France, the most common cancer of women worldwide is breast cancer, with more than a million new cases reported each year.
However .....
Proteins have been identified in saliva that can flag breast cancer.
Earlier this month, researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, announced a new study which has conclusively proved that a saliva test can identify specific protein markers in human saliva. When someone has breast cancer, the normal type and amount of proteins in glandular secretions is altered.
Streckfus and colleagues found about 130 proteins altogether. 49 of them were differently expressed between the healthy control pool and the two tumor pools.
One saliva sample was taken from those people in the study who had benign breast tumors; another sample was taken from those who had a malignant breast tumor and the last was a control sample taken from people who were perfectly healthy.
The research involved looking for differential expressions of proteins, using isotope tagging. Both tumor groups were compared to the healthy control group. One hundred and thirty proteins were found, but amazingly forty-nine of them were differently expressed between those that were healthy and the two control groups that had tumors.
Unbelievably, they also managed to find unique proteins that occur in a particular benign tumor called fibroadenoma, which is the most common type of benign breast tumor found. Streckfus explained:
"This is a unique finding, as it targets both the benign and malignant tumor, which could potentially reduce the number of false positives and false negatives associated with current cancer diagnostics".
Medical Breakthrough
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