In-Office Test is Effective at Detecting Recurrence of Bladder Cancer
A simple urine test, combined with a visual inspection by a doctor with a cystoscope, can raise the detection of bladder cancer recurrence to 99 percent. That¹s the finding of a study in the January 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In the JAMA study, H. Barton Grossman, M.D. from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Mark S. Soloway, M.D., chairman of the Department of Urology at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, and colleagues in seven other states followed 668 patients with a history of bladder cancer.
Half-a-million Americans have a history of bladder cancer and half will suffer a recurrence of the disease within two years. "Particularly in patients with high-risk bladder cancer who have had their tumor removed but are under very careful surveillance, this will add a level of reliability that the tumor has, in fact, not recurred," said Soloway, who is also the physician leader of the Prostate, Bladder, and Kidney Cancers Site Disease Group at UM/Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.
If detected early, bladder cancer is highly curable, with 94 percent of patients surviving five years or more. But about one in four patients is not diagnosed until the cancer has spread, cutting survival in half. Until now, there has not been a simple in-office test to reliably diagnose this disease.
The advantage to both the patient and the physician is the simplicity of the NMP22 test. A visual inspection requires threading a cystoscope up the urethra into the bladder, and cytology requires an invasive biopsy to retrieve a portion of tissue for a pathologist. Bladder cancer patients undergo these tests as many as four times a year. This test only requires a sample of urine on a test strip, making it a much less invasive way to monitor high-risk patients.
