Urine Test for Bladder Cancer
Reported October 26, 2005
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Measuring an enzyme in urine could be a useful detection method for bladder cancer in men. The research was presented in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Each year, more than 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with bladder cancer, which is on the rise, according to background information in the article. If the disease is diagnosed and treated in the early stage, survival chances are good. Detecting bladder cancer, however, is not easy. Current tests are invasive and costly or aren’t sensitive enough to pick up early forms of the cancer.
Researchers from the Morgagni-Pierantoni Hospital in Italy studied a new test to detect telomerase activity in the urine. The study included 84 healthy men and 134 men with diagnosed bladder cancer. Telomerase activity in the urine of the men was detected with a highly sensitive test.
Results of the study show the test had 90 percent sensitivity and 88 percent specificity. Specificity increased to 94 percent for men younger than 75. The sensitivity of the test in detecting bladder cancer was similar in patients with different stages of cancer. This was key, since current tests are not reliable at picking up early forms of the disease.
Study authors say, “The test we developed requires a small amount of urine; is noninvasive, inexpensive, and easy to perform Indeed, one important advantage of this test is its proven ability to also identify low-grade tumors, which often escape detection.”
Researchers say the test is not recommended for routine screening in all individuals because of the low incidence of bladder cancer. But they do say it should be used in people who are at high risk. They write, “Specifically, smokers have about a three-fold increased risk of developing bladder cancer compared with nonsmokers.”
“We believe that our telomerase activity urine assay, with the reliability verified in pilot and confirmatory studies, represents a promising and potentially important contribution to the early diagnosis of bladder [cancer], in particular for high-risk subgroups,” study authors say.
