Hmm, this sounds very interesting, and promising, and best of all SIMPLE for women who may not have access to mammograms or simply think they don’t have the time for them or money to pay for them if they have no insurance.  Plus, it may be cheaper than the much talked about genetic testing that is starting to happen around now.  Well, I won’t get ahead of myself, but those are the pluses that I think this news may entail if it comes to a reality.

Researchers are working as we speak on a test that helps to detect whether there may be breast tumors developing in a woman, which use the woman’s saliva to help detect this early on.  As I said it’s in development, but the mere fact that they are testing it means they’ve probably had some promising preliminary results if they are jumping into testing it for viability.

The saliva screening test would be able to distinguish between those women with benign (non cancerous) and malignant (cancerous) tumors, which is excellent, especially since lumps cause so much fear and concern and often end up being benign for women.  The reason they think they can develop this screening test for malignant breast cancer tumors is that there are certain proteins the body emits that would be present in the woman’s saliva if she had breast cancer tumors that were malignant, and the test could detect these proteins in the saliva, preliminary breast cancer research is suggesting. 

This is definitely going to be advantageous for women in developing countries, because mammograms are still too expensive to institute in these countries, and many woman do not have the money to pay for them in poor or underdeveloped countries.  Not only that, I’m thinking that we could definitely use something like that here in the US, you know.  Actually there are tons of women who put off or hate mammograms, and think of how easy it would be for them to submit a saliva test? The implications for this are far reaching in the field of breast cancer research and development and it is very exciting news. 

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Posted in Breast Cancer Prevention by Breast News Girl No Comments Yet