New liver test catches tumours earlier

A new blood test that can detect liver cancer at anearlier stage has been developed by researchers.

The test, which requires only a small blood sample, detects the cancer accurately in more than 50 per cent of cases in which previous diagnostic tests failed to provide an accurate diagnosis, according to Belgian and Chinese researchers who conducted the study.

The findings are published in an article in the August issue of Hepatology.

Liver cancer usually has a poor prognosis, with one of the lowest survival rates, according to the Canadian Cancer Society. In 2007, it's expected that 1,350 cases of liver cancer will be diagnosed in Canada and 670 people will die of the disease.

Development of the test involved examining blood concentrations in 450 Chinese patients with cirrhosis of the liver due to a hepatitis B virus infection. The research was funded by and primarily carried out at VIB, the Flanders Institute of Biotechnology.

Scientists discovered that the quantities of two particular sugar groups that appear on the blood proteins varied according to the stage of the disease. These values correlated with the size of the tumour.

The new blood test is based on the ratio of these values. It allowed researchers to to makea correct diagnosis in 70 per centof the cases.

Current methods of detecting cancerous tumours rely on the discovery of certain substances, or markers, in the blood. For the detection of liver cancer, the test looks for the marker AFP.

However,the AFP detectionprocess is often inadequate in providing a diagnosis and can lead to false positives, which are results that point to cancer when none is present.

When the new test is carried out with the AFP test, the accuracy of the diagnosis rises considerably,findingliver cancer in more than half of the patients with cirrhosis of the liver for whom the AFP test failed, researchers reported.