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Copenhagen (pte016/03.03.2005/10:45) - Danish scientists have discovered a way to detect early signs of testicular cancer before it has started to spread. They hope their work could lead to a simple screening test for men at risk of the disease. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, using a technique to analyse a semen sample, the researchers diagnosed the early stages of cancer in a 23-year-old man who had been thought to be healthy. The study was carried out by the Rigshospitalet http://www.rigshospitalet.dk in Copenhagen and published in the journal Human Reproduction http://humrep.oupjournals.org .
Each year in Europe, there are around 13,200 new cases of testicular cancer, making it now the most common form of cancer in men between the ages of 20 and 39. More than 90 per cent of cases can be cured, especially if the disease is picked up at an early stage. However, it is often difficult to detect the cancer before it has started to spread. This means that surgery is usually accompanied by chemotherapy or radiotherapy, both of which can cause infertility. Previous studies on the disease have shown the calls showing the early stages of testicular cancer - pre-invasive testicular carcinoma in situ (CIS) - could be detected in semen samples of patients with the disease. However, detection was difficult, time-consuming and unreliable.
The new work is based on detecting a protein called AP-2gamma, which is produced by CIS cells, but not healthy cells. The Danish researchers compared semen samples from 12 patients with known testicular cancer with those from apparently healthy men, and others with different types of cancer and fertility problems. The key protein was not only found in the known testicular cancer patients, but also in the man who had been thought healthy. Further evaluation, including a biopsy, confirmed that in fact he had CIS in his left testicle.
"To our knowledge, this is the first report of the diagnosis of testicular cancer at the pre-invasive CIS stage in a semen sample from a young patient with suspected infertility, who, if not for the inclusion in our study, would most probably have been diagnosed much later, perhaps only after an overt tumour had developed," said researcher Niels Skakkebaek. According to Skakkebaek, more work is needed before a screening test can be perfected. In the first study, it detected testicular cancer in five out of 12 people with known disease, but nobody was incorrectly identified as having the disease. "The real advantage would be that young men could be diagnosed at the pre-invasive stage of testicular cancer, when only surgery would be required," he added.
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