Isaac Kinde Endometrial Cancers Evaluation of DNA from the Papanicolaou Test to Detect Ovarian

approval, women will have even more reasons to make sure they get their Pap smears routinely. are fully validated and the new test gains et al. is possible with existing methods. Once the findings of Kinde approach cannot identify every ovarian tumor, it may be able to detect more of them earlier and more accurately than woman as harboring a cancer, raising the possibility of its eventual use as a screening test for cancer. Even if this healthy doctors use to collect sample cells for the Pap test. Importantly, though, the new test has not misclassified any larger groups of patients and to improve the yield of screening for ovarian tumors, perhaps by modifying the technique diagnosing genital tract tumors, particularly ovarian cancer. More research is needed to validate the current results in This new approach to Pap testing is not yet ready for clinical use and will not serve as a foolproof method of cancers were detectable by this method. mutations found in the cancer cells. In the initial set of samples, 100% of endometrial cancers and 41% of ovarian the authors used massively parallel sequencing to test patients' Pap specimens for some of the more common that such cells may be detectable among the cervical cells in a Pap smear, if one knew how to identify them. Thus, then hypothesized that ovarian and endometrial cancers likely shed cells from their surfaces and et al. their list. Kinde endometrial or ovarian cancers and confirmed that all 46 harbored at least some of the common genetic changes on data for ovarian cancer and new data on 22 endometrial tumors. They tested 46 samples from patients with The authors first assembled a catalog of common mutations in these cancers, drawing on previously published endometrial and the dreaded ovarian cancer, which is essentially untreatable unless it is caught early. that may make the Pap smear even more versatile by expanding it into a test for multiple cancers, including technique papillomavirus, the pathogen known to cause cervical cancer. Now, Kinde and coauthors have developed a woman's cervix before they turn into an invasive cancer, was updated a decade ago to screen for DNA from human lives in the decades since its inception. The now-routine smear, which allows doctors to detect abnormal cells in a Patients generally do not enjoy getting a Pap smear, but the procedure has saved hundreds of thousands of New Adventures of Old Pap Smear