New blood test which can detect prostate cancer with 94% accuracy is made available in Britain

A blood test is now available in Britain that can help detect more than 90 percent of prostate cancer cases.

Currently, men who go to the doctor with complaints such as difficulty urinating have a test that is about 55 percent accurate.

This means that thousands of men are wrongly told they may have prostate cancer and unnecessarily undergo a painful biopsy or scan.

The new test, which is available privately, can pick up signs of cancer by identifying abnormalities in gene activity. Patients must complete a form with their doctor and have a blood sample taken, which will be sent to a laboratory in the US for testing.

Early studies using the Prostate Screening EpiSwitch found that when used in addition to the standard test, 94 percent of cases were picked up.

The test looks for changes in immune cells in the blood, which signal changes in gene activity in the early stages of cancer.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, affecting one in eight. But delays in diagnosis mean that around 12,000 men each year do not find out they have the disease until it has already spread.

This is partly because there is no single, reliable test, with standard prostate-specific antigen tests notorious for producing both false-positive and negative results. The PSE test took ten years to create, with experts from Oxford BioDynamics working together with Imperial College London, University of East Anglia, Imperial College NHS Trust and experts from across the UK.

Mathias Winkler, consultant urologist and surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital and Imperial College London, said the test offers ‘unprecedented accuracy’.

It is not yet available on the NHS and would need to be tried on a wide range of men to ensure it is accurate before it can be considered by regulators.

The Mail has been fighting to raise awareness of prostate cancer and treatments for almost 25 years.