Cancer diagnosis can change a person’s life drastically. With concerns of declining mental health, the grueling treatment takes a massive toll on their bodies. While there are treatments available, the best way to ensure a person’s quality of life and health and safety comes when it is diagnosed early. However, many cancers show symptoms only when the disease has progressed too much. To tackle this, researchers found a study that can not only diagnose early but also diagnose 50 types of cancer. A major new study has found that a simple blood test could be a game-changer for finding cancer. This test, called Galleri and developed by the company Grail, is designed to spot signs of more than 50 different types of cancer from just one blood sample. The science behind the test is quite clever, it looks for tiny bits of DNA from cancer tumors that break off and circulate in your blood. By finding these fragments, the test can potentially find cancer much earlier, even before a person has any symptoms. This early detection is critical because more than half of the cancers found in this trial were at an early stage. When cancer is found early, it's typically easier to treat, and the patient has the best possible chance of being cured. How Can One Blood Test Reveal Multiple Cancers? The promising information comes from a major study that followed 25,000 adults across the United States and Canada for a year. The results showed the test is effective and reliable: How Accurate Was It? The test proved to be highly accurate at correctly identifying people without cancer, ruling out cancer in over $99\%$ of negative results. Among the small number of people who tested positive, cancer was confirmed in 62% of the cases. Catching More Cancers When the Galleri test was added to standard cancer screenings (like those for breast or colon cancer), it increased the total number of cancers found by seven times. This means it caught many cancers that would have otherwise been missed. Focusing on Missing Cancers Importantly, three-quarters of the cancers the test found were types that we currently have no routine screening program for, such as cancers of the pancreas, liver, and stomach. The test could correctly identify where the tumor started in nine out of 10 cases. The researchers explained that this data could cause a "fundamental change" in how doctors approach cancer screening by helping them find these diseases earlier when treatment is most effective. How Will This Cancer Research Help Early Diagnoses? These strong results suggest that the Galleri blood test could eventually save many lives by catching cancer early. Because of this promise, the test is already being studied in a large trial by the NHS in England, involving 140,000 patients. However, other scientists stress the need for more proof before the test is used everywhere. Experts pointed that in future, larger studies must confirm whether detecting cancer earlier with Galleri actually reduces cancer-related deaths.There are also concerns about what is called "overdiagnosing," meaning finding slow-growing cancers that might never have caused a person harm. The full results of the major NHS trial are expected next year. If the trial is a success, the NHS plans to expand the testing to another one million people.
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