Category: Oral Cancer

Spit proteins could lead to oral cancer test

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A simple screen of proteins in human saliva was able to accurately detect a common type of oral cancer, a finding that may lead to a painless new diagnostic test, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The test can predict the mouth cancer in 93 percent of cases, a team at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

It is among the first of a new set of spit-based diagnostic tests expected to arise from a protein map of human saliva developed by researchers at UCLA and other centers.