Changes in routine blood tests in patients with unexplained weight loss could help identify cancer: Study

New Delhi, Changes across routine blood tests among patients with unexplained weight loss could be associated with a cancer diagnosis and should be interpreted after accounting for age and sex, according to a study.

Findings published in the journal PLOS Medicine suggest that monitoring changes in routine blood test results in patients with unexplained weight loss could help identify patients in primary care who would benefit from additional cancer testing.

"Blood test abnormalities should be interpreted after age and sex adjustment to improve triage for cancer investigation in patients attending primary care with UWL ," authors wrote.

"We show how blood test results are made more accurate for cancer by adding patient age and sex. This relatively simple calculation could easily be performed at the laboratory," author Brian Nicholson, from the UK's University of Oxford, said.

Researchers said that while abnormal blood test results, such as low haemoglobin or increased platelet counts, can provide clues about a patient's risk of developing cancer, monitoring trends over repeat tests could provide further clues in some instances, by identifying cancer-related changes in blood test results that do not appear abnormal.

Assessing patterns in blood test abnormalities and trends alongside unexplained weight loss could enhance cancer risk assessment and support earlier diagnosis, they said.

The team looked at more than 2,75,000 patients, nearly 14,000 of whom were subsequently diagnosed with cancer within six months this allowed the researchers to relate abnormalities on single tests and trends over repeat blood tests to cancer diagnosis.

Overall, 26 blood test trends were associated with overall cancer risk, with abnormalities also associated with specific cancer types.

After accounting for age and sex, blood test trends were found to be more discriminative for cancer diagnosis, compared to individual abnormal test results.

For example, trends in white blood count and neutrophils were linked to lung cancer while trends in red blood cell count, haematocrit, and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio were associated with prostate cancer.

Haematocrit is the ratio of the volume occupied by packed red blood cells to the volume of the whole blood.

The study found "twenty six trends for cancer overall, mean cell volume trend for bowel cancer and lymphoma, white blood count and neutrophil trend for lung cancer, and aspartate aminotransferase, red blood cell count, haematocrit, and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio trend for prostate cancer."

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