Saliva testing does not diagnose breast cancer

A saliva test that costs less than €5 can detect breast cancer

New saliva test”This is not an early diagnosis test.“Breast cancer because it does not identify the disease at subclinical stages (before symptoms and high tumor burden appear), so “it cannot be compared with an early detection system such as mammography,” according to a member of that Spanish Society of Medical Radiology (SERAM)Dr. Miriam Montes, radiologist specializing in breast imaging and densitometry.

After a new saliva test capable of detecting breast cancer biomarkers was tested by the University of Florida (USA) and the National Yang Ming Chiaotung University (Taiwan) on 21 women, including 4 healthy ones, an expert warns that these biomarkers only serve to “monitor the disease when the woman already has cancer” and “the tumor burden is very high.”

Therefore, Dr. Miriam Montes emphasizes that Mammography “today is the only tool to achieve the goal to detect breast cancer at a subclinical stage.

“This article is an experiment in 17 patients. “The clinical trials that have been done to demonstrate that mammography is an effective early detection method and that we are screening in our health care system because of it are clinical trials that have been conducted on thousands and thousands of women, healthy and sick.” the expert adds.

In this sense, he assures that the detection of biomarkers, both in blood and saliva, “is something that is being studied a lot” with “publications over several years”, but, in addition, “they are sometimes non-specific” and that Mammography provides the greatest sensitivity and specificity.

Likewise, he concludes that this new test may be “very useful for disease monitoringto see how the treatment works,” and that “in 20 years,” he adds, “we’ll know what potential it might have.”