Nov 20, 2021 08:49PM charlierun wrote:

Hi Bessie, Thanks for the reply, it has made me question the claim of the 95.8% accuracy of the blood test in detecting early stage breast cancer. There was even a Television news station reporting on the Syntra blood test and encouraging people to take the test.
If a blood teat is able to detect breast cancer it would be a game changer. I will check with my physician to see what she knows about this test and continue to do some research

Nov 21, 2021 07:41AM mountainmia wrote:

Signatera could be a breakthrough, but it's only useful for identifying remnants of previously diagnosed tumors, not for diagnosing cancers with no previous evidence of disease.

"Signatera is a custom-built circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) test for treatment monitoring and molecular residual disease (MRD) assessment in patients previously diagnosed with cancer. The test is available for both clinical and research use, and has been granted three Breakthrough Device Designations by the FDA for multiple cancer types and indications. The Signatera test is personalized and tumor-informed, providing each individual with a customized blood test tailored to fit the unique signature of clonal mutations found in that individual's tumor. This maximizes accuracy for detecting the presence or absence of residual disease in a blood sample, even at levels down to a single tumor molecule in a tube of blood. Signatera is intended to detect and quantify how much cancer is left in the body, to detect recurrence earlier and to help optimize treatment decisions. Signatera test performance has been clinically validated in multiple cancer types including colorectal, non-small cell lung, breast, and bladder cancers. "

https://www.natera.com/company/news/fda-grants-two...

Nov 21, 2021 06:56PM lauri wrote:

Does anyone else think "Theranos" when hearing announcements like this?

My medical center doesn't even use tumor marker tests.

Nov 22, 2021 01:44AM wc3 wrote:

There are a few such tests but none of them have been adopted as part of the standard of care by my cancer center.

One of my sisters wants me to get this one:

Galleri Cancer Test

I believe it's not FDA approved.

I would love to know with more certainty whether or not there is still cancer in me.

If I did have one of these tests and it was positive, as was a retest, then a few questions would arise.

If head and chest MRIs and ultrasounds fail to find anything, and a nuclear bone scan and chest CT find nothing. Do we do a full body PET/CT?

If so, that would be two nuclear bone scans, three PET scans, two partial body CTs and two full body CTs in my lifetime, as well as a number of chest x-rays, and that works out to a statistically significant amount of radiation exposure, and a non negligible cancer risk from it.

What if the PET/CT is negative? Did that mean the cancer test yielded a false positive and I have irradiated myself for nothing, or is the cancer just too small to detect?

Does it detect dormant cancer?

Does having residual microscopic breast cancer somewhere, dormant or otherwise, mean it's an issue?

Some breast cancer survivors, particularly those who had ER+, have recurrences decades later. I read a case study of a woman in India who had a recurrence over 50 years post surgery at the mastectomy site. What if most survivors have residual cancer cells but they just never become an issue either because they never wake from dormancy or the immune system suppresses them or they are very low grade?

If the cancer test is positive and continues to be, but conventional testing and imaging doesn't find anything, does my treatment change? Probably not other than perhaps extending it for as long as the test yields positive.

What are the implications of a negative test result?