Study: Breath Test Could Detect Stomach and Oesophageal Cancers

A paper presented at the European Cancer Congress reported promising results on a trial that used breath tests to detect oesophageal and stomach cancers in patients.

The breath test could increase the number of early diagnoses for patients with oesophageal or stomach cancers, which are often diagnosed late and have a 5-year survival rate of 15%.
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“A breath test could be used as a non-invasive, first-line test to reduce the number of unnecessary endoscopies. In the longer term this could also mean earlier diagnosis and treatment, and better survival,” Dr. Sheraz Markar, an NIHR Clinical Trials Fellow from Imperial College London, stated.

The research was based on prior studies that suggested that patients with stomach or oesophageal cancer have differences in the levels of specific chemicals—including butyric, pentanoic and hexanoic acids, butanal, and decanal—and that their cells had a different chemical signature than those of healthy individuals.

Breath samples from 335 individuals, 163 diagnosed with stomach or oesophageal cancer and 172 who underwent an endoscopic produce and showed no evidence of cancer, were used to test the efficacy of the breath test in detecting the chemical signature of cancer cells. 

Overall, the test had an 85% accuracy rating, with a sensitivity of 80% and specificity of 81%.

“This study suggests that we may be able detect these differences and use a breath test to indicate which patients are likely to have cancer of the oesophagus and stomach, and which do not. However, these findings must be validated in a larger sample of patients before the test could be used in the clinic,” Dr Markar said.

The team will continue to research the effectiveness of the breath test, and will perform another trial using patients undergoing endoscopic procedures but have not yet been diagnosed with cancer to determine if the breath test could be used in general practice.

—Melissa Weiss

Reference:

Breath test could help detect stomach and oesophageal cancers [press release]. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. January 26, 2017. http://www.eccocongress.org/Global/News/ECCO2017-News/2017/01/ECCO2017-NEWS-Breath-test-could-help-detect-stomach-and-oesophageal-cancers.