Mayo Clinic: Tampons May Provide Early Screening Tool For Endometrial Cancer
The Mayo Clinic released a study examining the potential of ordinary tampons as a screening tool for early stage endometrial cancer. Researchers hope their findings lead to the design of an effective and convenient diagnostic tool that could be used at home.
The human body possesses genes that can suppress the development of tumors, but these genes can be mutated or disguised by growing tumors in a chemical process called methylation. In recent years, researchers have been investigating how these methylated genes might work as biomarkers to treat or diagnose cancers.
A study conducted at Innsbruck University back in 2004 found that DNA samples collected from the cervicovaginal secretions of women with endometrial cancer contained three or more methylated genes. In comparison, 91 percent of women who did not have cancer had fewer than three methylated genes. These researchers also introduced the idea of using tampons to collect the biospecimens for DNA analysis.
The authors of the 2004 study concluded that their results merited a “prospective clinical trial to screen asymptomatic women who are high risk for endometrial cancer.”
According to a recent Mayo Clinic press release, there was no follow-up to this research until this year.
“No one really took that idea and ran with it. We wanted to take this initial study one step further and use advance in technology to see if we could develop a better method of differentiating between cancerous and benign cells,” said Jamie Bakkum-Gamez, a gynecologic oncologist at the Mayo Clinic, and lead author of a 2015 study on the techniques.
In a 2015 study reported in Gynecologic Oncology, Bakkum-Gamez’s team compared the tampon collection method to currently used endometrial brushing. They also analyzed 97 methylated sites from an expanded list of 12 genes, some newly discovered by the research team.
The researchers found that methylation was higher in specimens from women with endometrial cancer, and the tampon collection method was far better tolerated and preferred by the women participating in the study.
The American Cancer Society predicts that there will be over 50,000 new cases of endometrial cancer diagnosed in 2015, and estimates over 10,000 women will die from the cancer. Though endometrial cancer is one of the most common gynecological cancers among women in the U.S., there is currently no early screening tool to catch the malignancy in its early stages.
“Unfortunately, there is no equivalent to Pap smear or a mammogram for endometrial cancer,” said Bakkum-Gamez in the press release. “Our goal is to use our findings to develop a tool for the early detection of endometrial cancer that women could use in the comfort of their own homes.”
According to Bakkum-Gamez, the methods are still years away from clinical use, but she predicts that these findings could be developed into a product similar to Cologuard, recently approved by the FDA as an at-home screening kit for colon cancer.
“Cologuard could revolutionize colon cancer screening,” said Bakkum-Gamez, “and our test has the potential to do the same for endometrial cancer.”