A cheap new blood test can detect 14 types of cancer before they spread

Cancer is a major killer accounting for nearly one in six deaths worldwide. The most effective way to treat it is to detect it early, and new, groundbreaking blood tests offer hope on this front.

Researchers in Sweden have developed a simple, non-invasive test they say can accurately detect 14 different types of stage I cancers.

They used machine learning to track levels of glycosaminoglycans – a type of sugar that is an important part of our metabolism – as biomarkers to detect cancer in the blood and urine samples of 1,260 volunteers.

In their study, published in the scientific journal PNAS, the authors said their method could detect stage I cancer with a sensitivity of up to 62 per cent.

The test’s specificity – the proportion of true negatives it correctly predicted – was high, at 95 per cent, and it also predicted where the tumours were located with 89 per cent accuracy.

According to the charity Cancer Research UK, more than 90 per cent of patients with either bowel cancer, breast cancer or ovarian cancer survive at least five years if the disease is diagnosed and treated at the earliest stage.

The problem is that most patients are still being diagnosed late, making it more difficult for the treatment to be successful.

Screening programs for breast, prostate, lung, colorectal, and cervical cancer can all significantly reduce mortality rates.

However, there are several challenges to early detection: invasive and costly tests, false positives, but also the simple fact that there currently are no standard screening methods for some cancers such as brain tumours and kidney cancer.

Another prevention tool has been liquid biopsies, a type of blood test that can detect DNA for tumours when these are still invisible. 

But the