Category Archives: Incidence

ROCA Ovarian Cancer Test for Early Detection

Each year, about 20,000 women in the United States get ovarian cancer. Among women in the United States, ovarian cancer is the eighth most common cancer and the fifth leading cause of cancer death, after lung and bronchus, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. In 2012 (the most recent year numbers are available)— 20,785 women in the United States were diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and 14,404 women in the United States died from ovarian cancer. Continue reading

Cancer diagnostics in clinical use

Diagnostics that not only diagnose cancer, but also help select the appropriate therapy and monitor response are a mainstay in modern oncology, and their use is growing.  Precision medicine, identifying genetic markers of disease and designing treatments to exploit these, is the essence of  targeted cancer therapy.   Continue reading

Epigenetic signature in blood for breast cancer risk

As reported in Genomic Medicine on June 27, an epigenetic signature in patients with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations was found by examining DNA methylation (DNAme) patterns on whole blood samples.  Importantly, this signature predicted for a high risk of developing breast cancer even in those patients who did NOT have BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. Continue reading