Scouring pad helps doctors detect esophageal cancer – De Morgen

Researchers at Cambridge University have developed a new tool to detect esophageal cancer earlier: a scouring pad on a string. The invention must GPs enable them to discover the very deadly disease at an early stage and to save lives.

The capsule on a string looks a little like a rather poor solution, but it is a promising new detection method to detect esophageal cancer at an early stage: the Cytosponge .

Het operates as follows. The patient swallows the capsule, which contains the packed scourer through. After a few minutes, the capsule dissolves and unfolds the sponge itself. The doctor or nurse can then pull back the string. Along the way scraped off the sponge over the whole range of cells from the wall of the esophagus. The cells are examined in the lab.

Audience Research
To detect abnormal cells need a doctor now with an endoscope, a flexible tube with a camera on it end, look into the esophagus. During the examination, the doctor look biopsies, snacks cells, from the wall. The cells are viewed under the microscope and judged on characteristics of malignancy.

The big disadvantage of this detection method is that only collected a few spots cells. Chances are greater that severely abnormal cells are missed.

Stage
Healthy esophageal cells change when exposed to, for example backflow of stomach acid. Step by step, stacking the abnormalities in the cells. This creates a Barrett’s esophagus, a precancerous. Often it is the part with aberrant cells several centimeters long. One to five hundred people with pre eventually get cancer.

Esophageal cancer is, if it is detected at an early, treatable. But if patients receive complaints and report to the doctor, it is often too late. To show how serious the disease is, of every ten patients whose disease is established, after five years only one alive

DNA damage
The deceitfulness of Barrett’s esophagus is the abnormal cells are not all equally different. From the outside, through the endoscope, the doctor can not see exactly which cells are the most severely affected. When the cells are exposed to harmful substances occurs on DNA damage. Only at a certain amount of damage is going on in a different cell cancer.

How the precursor turns into esophageal cancer is not well known. The Cytosponge researchers hope to get more information about it. The research results were published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics .