Saliva tests could someday be used to look for genetic indicators of cancer, according to a University of California, Los Angeles study.
The UCLA team got promising results when it used this kind of test on 32 people with head and neck cancers. The test was able to correctly identify cancer nine times out of 10, BBC News reported.
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While these results were good, they weren't good enough, the researchers said. They're currently recruiting 200 oral cancer patients for a larger study and hope to increase the test's accuracy closer to 100 percent.
The study appears in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.
For a number of years, scientists have been trying to develop methods of detecting cancer using saliva, urine and faeces samples instead of blood tests. – (HealthDayNews)
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