Blood test helped detect cancer before symptoms, study finds
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Chief Medical Writer
For the first time, a blood test has been shown to help detect many types of cancer in a study of thousands of women with no symptoms of the disease. The test is still experimental and even its fans say it needs to be improved. Yet the results released on Tuesday show what benefits and drawbacks might come from using these gene-based tests, called liquid biopsies, in routine care. In the study published in Science, the test doubled the number of cancers detected when used along with standard screening tools like mammograms.