New Delhi, Changes across routine blood tests among patients with unexplained weight loss could be associated with a cancer diagnosis and should be interpreted after accounting for age and sex, according to a study.
Findings published in the journal PLOS Medicine suggest that monitoring changes in routine blood test results in patients with unexplained weight loss could help identify patients in primary care who would benefit from additional cancer testing. “We show how blood test results are made more accurate for cancer by adding patient age and sex. After accounting for age and sex, blood test trends were found to be more discriminative for cancer diagnosis, compared to individual abnormal test results.
This relatively simple calculation could easily be performed at the laboratory,” author Brian Nicholson, from the UK’s University of Oxford, said. Researchers said that while abnormal blood test results, such as low haemoglobin or increased platelet counts, can provide clues about a patient’s risk of developing cancer, monitoring trends over repeat tests could provide further clues in some instances, by identifying cancer-related changes in blood test results that do not appear abnormal. The study found “twenty six trends for cancer overall, mean cell volume trend for bowel cancer and lymphoma, white blood count and neutrophil trend for lung cancer, and aspartate aminotransferase, red blood cell count, haematocrit, and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio trend for prostate cancer.”
