Blood tests show potential to detect cancer years before clinical diagnosis

New research indicates that blood tests may detect signs of cancer significantly earlier than traditional imaging scans. A study led by researchers at Lund University involving the Pathlight blood test found that circulating tumor DNA could identify metastatic breast cancer a median of 13.8 months before it became clinically visible, with some signals appearing nearly four years in advance.

In a separate longitudinal study published in Cell Genomics, researchers from the University of Toronto, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the University of Oxford analyzed archived biological samples from the Ontario Health Study. They discovered that epigenetic alterations and cell-free DNA signatures could appear in blood plasma up to eight years before a clinical diagnosis.

The Canadian study noted that the strongest predictive signals were found in prostate cancer patients, where specific DNA methylation patterns identified a 3.55 times higher risk of disease. While breast cancer markers were also detectable, they showed lower overall predictability and varied more significantly across different tumor subtypes and patient ages.