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Pioneering home-based fingertip sweat tests could replace painful breast cancer tests, a new study suggests.
Professor Simona Francese discovered that sweat on a person’s finger can allow scientists to mark the presence of breast cancer with 98 percent accuracy due to the protein it contains.
For the last 15 years, the expert worked with the police on a method to collect information from fingerprints left at crime scenes and, in doing so, discovered the cancer detection technique.
Based on a study of 15 women, they found that the simple method could detect the disease and its severity and only required the person to smear their fingertips in a sample dish.
A team of researchers from Sheffield Hallam University working with Prof Francese concluded that the process could eventually replace mammography once larger trials have been carried out.
Professor Simona Francese (pictured) discovered that sweat from a person’s finger can allow scientists to mark the presence of breast cancer with 98% accuracy.
Currently, during mammograms, a technologist will place a person’s breast between two plastic plates and compress the plates to take an x-ray.
The NHS advises that breast screening tests are often uncomfortable and sometimes painful for some people.
Compressions take a few seconds to complete, and the appointment itself usually takes about 20 minutes.
The new method offers patients the ability to test from the comfort of their own homes, instead of traveling to a hospital and performing the painful tests.
A sample aluminum collection plate can be sent to people every few years.
The French teacher said sunday times: ‘By looking at molecules that tell us the sex of the individual, we stumbled upon some molecules (small proteins and peptides) that are also indicated as potential biomarkers of breast cancer.’
The way the method works is that a person’s fingerprint is sprayed with a chemical coating and placed in a mass spectrometer, where the sweat sample is turned into a gas using a powerful laser.
Once this is done, scientists can evaluate the different proteins, resulting in a molecular profile that provides an accurate marker of breast cancer.
The researchers concluded that the process could eventually replace mammography once it has been taken to larger trials.
Of the 15 women in the trial, five had benign non-cancerous lumps, five had early breast cancer, and another five had metastatic breast cancer that had spread throughout the body.
Professor Lynda Wyld, a professor at the University of Sheffield and a cancer surgeon at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, who also worked on the study, said: “But the data we have so far is very promising.” If it is validated and shown to work in subsequent trials, it has enormous potential.”
His team is also working to find out if the same technique could be used for other cancers, including prostate cancer, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The NHS recently announced that in England last year, just 1.97 million women aged 50 to 70 (62.3 per cent) attended screening appointments within six months of being invited out of the 3.17 million encouraged to book a checkup.
The UK’s breast screening program currently has the longest gaps between screens in the world.
Prof Francese’s team (pictured) is also working to determine if the same technique could be used for other cancer variants.
Dame Lesley, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Imperial College London, said the choice to have women get mammograms once every three years was based on the budgets available at the time screening was introduced. in the late 1980s.
However, more recent studies showed that annual checkups would save lives, since precancerous or early-onset lesions, which can be detected by screening tests, are curable.
According to Breast Cancer Now, around 55,000 women and 370 men are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK.
Screening tests can help find breast cancers early when they are too small to see or feel, and are essential for those who meet testing criteria.