This test, developed in the UK, is a very simple and inexpensive blood test that looks for mutations that are basically a by-product of cancer cells. So while it doesn’t detect the cancer itself, it’s finding evidence that cancer may be present. This is why they are calling it a “smoke detector” test. A smoke detector tells you there is a fire because it detects the smoke–a by-product of fire. This is very promising news for folks at high risk for cancer. From what I can gather, this has only been used to to detect esophogeal cancer—a cancer with a poor prognosis due to its reputation for late detection. Hopefully, the blood test generalizes to most cancers, since I would imagine, the mutation would still be present in the red blood cells. Read the full article here:
