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Predicting cancer years ahead with a blood test?

Scientists at Northwestern and Harvard universities say they’ve made a discovery that could lead to a blood test to predict cancer years before it’s diagnosed.

They linked changes in blood cell telomeres — protective caps on DNA strands that are a biological marker of aging — to later development of cancer.

Telomeres shrink with age. In people who later were diagnosed with cancer, they initially shrank much faster — appearing to be 15 years older than those in people who didn’t develop cancer. Then, three or four years before cancer was found in these people, the shrinking, or aging, of the telomeres stopped.

“Understanding this pattern of telomere growth may mean it can be a predictive biomarker for cancer,” said Dr. Lifang Hou, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine who was the lead author of the study reported Thursday in the journal EBioMedicine.

Dr. Lifang Hou, Northwestern University
Dr. Lifang Hou, Northwestern University

“Because we saw a strong relationship in the pattern across a wide variety of cancers, with the right testing, these procedures could be used to eventually diagnose a wide variety of cancers,” Hou said.

The research was described as the first to examine telomere changes over a broad span of time — 13 years — in people later diagnosed with cancer. The scientists measured telomeres in 792 people — 135 of them later were diagnosed with prostate, skin, lung, leukemia and other cancers.

Every time a cell divides, telomeres get shorter. With age, a body’s cells have divided more — and the telomeres have gotten shorter. Cancer cells divide and grow more rapidly than normal cells. So scientists wondered: Why don’t the telomeres get so short they finally disappear?

“We found cancer has hijacked the telomere-shortening in order to flourish in the body,” Hou said.

What’s still not clear is how. If scientists can figure that out, Hou said they might one day be able to develop treatments that would, instead, cause cancer cells to self-destruct but not damage healthy cells.

http://chicago.suntimes.com/health-care-news/7/71/562665/health-news-predicting-cancer-years-ahead-blood-test