Blood test spots prostate cancer without risky ops

A BLOOD test for prostate cancer could help thousands of men avoid needless invasive biopsies.

It detects circulating tumour cells (CTCs) and is believed to be more accurate than current methods.

Scientists said the discovery could lead to a “paradigm shift in the way we diagnose prostate cancer”.

More than 47,000 men are diagnosed with the disease every year in the UK.

Current prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing spots tumours early but has a high rate of false positives.

When a high PSA level in the blood is detected, a tissue biopsy of the prostate gland is carried out.

After the procedure, which carries a significant risk of bleeding and infection, three-quarters of men with elevated PSA levels are found not to have cancer.

For those who do, doctors often struggle to work out which cases are aggressive and need treatment and which can be left alone as they are unlikely to prove fatal.

The new CTC test was developed by researchers at Queen Mary University of London.

It measures living cancer cells in the blood, rather than the PSA protein which may be present for reasons other than cancer. Lead researcher Professor Yong-Jie Lu said: “The current prostate cancer test often leads to unnecessary invasive biopsies and over-diagnosis and over-treatment of many men, causing significant harm to patients and a waste of healthcare resources.

“Testing for circulating tumour cells is efficient, non-invasive and potentially accurate, and we’ve now demonstrated its potential to improve care.”

The study, in the Journal of Urology, looked at the use of the CTC test in 98 pre-biopsy patients and 155 newly diagnosed prostate cancer patients at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.

The test detected aggressive prostate cancer and correctly predicted the outcome of later biopsies.

When the two blood tests were used together, they predicted the presence of dangerous tumours with more than 90 per cent accuracy.

The number and type of CTCs in the blood also helped indicate how aggressive the cancer was.

The findings will need to be validated by further studies.

If successful, researchers said the CTC test could be available on the NHS in as little as three years.

Sara Hiom, Cancer Research UK’s director of early diagnosis, said: “It’s early days, so the next steps would be to study a larger number of people.”