American scientists are currently testing the detection of 50 different types of cancer with a single innovative blood test in a first prospective case-control study because 500,000 new cases of cancer alone are diagnosed every year. In addition, a 23 percent increase in new cases of cancer is expected in the next 15 years due to demographic changes in society alone. According to this study, cancer develops more frequently in old age due to slower metabolic processes, and many types of cancer do not show any symptoms in the early stages. However, cancer research in the United States has now reported initial success in the fight against 50 types of cancer, including dangerous ones. The Grail company has developed an innovative test method that can detect DNA fragments in the blood following the decay of tumour cells. These gene variants, which can also be called mutations, can thus be assigned to a specific type of cancer. So-called methylation patterns of the cell-free DNA of tumour cells can be determined in this way, which can be distinguished from the cell-free DNA of normal body cells. In the first „Ccga“ and „Strive“ studies, the innovative blood test showed a specificity of 99.3 percent, which means that a total of 6689 subjects tested had a false-positive result in only 0.7 percent of them. This means that 47 people were diagnosed with cancer, but no cancer was present. A high specificity rate is critical because high therapeutic costs are incurred that could have been avoided. The test revealed that 4207 people were not diagnosed with cancer, but 2482 of the test subjects were diagnosed with tumours, including twelve types of cancer such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer, leukaemia, etc., which often lead to death. However, the sensitivity value of the American blood test was only 67.3 percent, which means that in 32.7 out of one hundred people, the test was a false negative. In other words, in almost 33 out of one hundred people, the blood test failed to detect one in 50 cancers.
