New Blood Test Could Help To Predict Breast Cancer Sooner

New findings published in the journal Metabolism show how a new blood test could help to accurately predict future breast cancer in patients.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen are hopeful that this could help bring about better prevention methods and earlier detection.

"The method is better than mammography, which can only be used when the disease has already occurred. It is not perfect, but it is truly amazing that we can predict breast cancer years into the future," said Rasmus Bro, a professor of chemometrics in the Department of Food Science at University of Copenhage, in a news release.

For the study, researchers used food science to help control complex industrial processes in the development of large analyzing amounts of biological data in a "holistic and explorative" way, which allowed the team to look at all compounds in a blood sample, instead of a single biomarker in relation to a specific disease as is often done in modern medicine. The research was based on a population of 57,000 people over the course of two decades.

"When a huge amount of relevant measurements from many individuals is used to assess health risks - here breast cancer - it creates very high quality information. The more measurements our analyses contain, the better the model handles complex problems," Bro added.

Findings revealed that the metabolic blood profile changed one in a pre-cancer state. As mammography can detect breast cancer as it develops with a sensitivity of 75 percent, the metabolic blood profile predicts a woman's risk of developing breast cancer in the next two to five years with a sensitivity of 80 percent.