New test could improve detection of aggressive prostate cancer

A simple blood test has been developed that detects aggressive and potentially lethal prostate cancer by identifying rare free-ranging tumour cells.

The cells can flag up patients who have a ten-fold increased risk of dying from their disease, allowing targeted treatments to be delivered as quickly as possible.

Each year more than 40,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer. Often the disease is localised, slow growing, and relatively easy to treat.

In other cases, the cancer is 0 The new blood test is said to provide highly accurate results much more aggressive and likely to spread or “metastasise” to other parts of the body, such as the bones and liver.

Spotting these dangerous cancers early on before they produce secondary tumours that show up on scans is not easy.

The new test, described in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, is said to provide a highly accurate and straightforward way to single out patients with life-threatening prostate cancer.

It identifies two specific types of circulating tumour cell (CTC) linked to metastasis and poor patient survival.

These are tumour fragments that have broken away from the primary cancer and are travelling freely through the blood stream.