According to a study, a blood test could predict kidney cancer risk and survival, five years prior to its diagnosis.
Kidney-injury-molecule-1 (KIM-1) can be detected in the urine and blood and is generally present at low levels in healthy individuals. In a new study, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital explored whether a blood test can detect higher concentrations of KIM-1 in patients who will go on to develop kidney cancer up to five years later.Their results show that KIM-1 substantially helped distinguish between those who went on to develop kidney cancer from those who did not.”Early detection of kidney cancer can be lifesaving. We can cure kidney cancer when we detect it at an early stage, but patients with advanced kidney cancer have a very high death rate,” said Venkata Sabbisetti, adding, “However, kidney cancer is asymptomatic and many patients present with advanced kidney cancer at the time of diagnosis. Our results suggest that with further refinement, KIM-1 has the potential to identify patients with early, curable kidney cancer.”
The team reported that adding KIM-1 to a model for predicting kidney cancer risk approximately doubled the accuracy of that model. KIM-1 was substantially more sensitive for kidney cancer detection than prostate specific antigen is for prostate cancer. However, given how much rarer Renal cell carcinoma (RCC).
