A new blood test could offer an early warning sign to breast cancer patients that the disease has returned after surgery and chemotherapy treatments. Capable of detecting tumour DNA circulating in the patient’s blood, the test successfully identified signs of relapse in 12 out of 15 patients, an average of 7.9 months before visible signs of cancer appeared. Turner and his team worked with 55 woman who had been diagnosed with early-stage, localised breast cancer.
Each of them were treated with either surgery, chemotherapy, or both, and the researchers followed their progress for the next two years, giving them the blood test once every six months or until they had a relapse. Fifteen of the women ended up relapsing, and the blood test detected the tumour DNA in 12 of them. "The other three patients all had cancers that had spread to the brain where the protective blood-brain…
