What makes cancer a killer?

    The answer is cancer is not managed as well as it could be due to:

Shortfalls in targeted therapy

Our limited grasp of disease biology

Limited understanding of environmental factors that trigger its advance

But the real differentials in survival, the life and death deciders, come down to one thing: the speed and accuracy of diagnosis.  Despite advances in drug development and surgical dexterity, the cancers that kill in greatest number are those that are not caught early.

In about 90 percent of cases of lung cancer, the sufferer will die within five years of diagnosis.  Get the cancer when it has yet to start spreading and you have a better than 50-50 chance of surviving that period.  The problem is that only 15 percent of cases are diagnosed at an early stage.  If the tumour metastasises, about three in every 100 sufferers will live for five years.  These shortfalls in diagnosis are deadly for the patient and soul-destroying for the medical community.

For many people, especially men, the first time they know they have cancer is when they finally go to a doctor complaining of pains, only to discover that they have a tumour already the size of a golf ball. It is, by then, often too late. Little surprise that globally in about 90 per cent of lung cancer cases the sufferer will die within five years of diagnosis.

The discovery of a simple blood test that can detect a cancer before a tumour has even taken shape is therefore of enormous potential significance.  The test, developed after 15 years research by scientists in Nottingham, UK and Kansas, US accurately identifies the signals sent out by a person’s immune system as a cancer is germinating in the body.

In their early development, cancers involve irregular cells that produce small amounts of antigens, “rogue” protein material.  These are detected by the immune system, which produces quantities of its own antibody proteins to confront the abnormality.  These signals can now be picked up by oncologists long before a tumour has begun to form.  And if doctors can tell, from blood analysis, that the body is battling a cancer early in the process of cell division, they can begin an intervention that has a far greater chance of success than one that is prompted only by using a computerised tomography (CT) scan.  This procedure normally picks up the disease after it has established itself in the body.

Source: The London Times, June 2010