A smear from a nose will replace complicated lung cancer diagnostic procedures

As a rule, a cancer diagnostics is an invasive and unpleasant procedure. Because of incorrectly diagnosed "cancer" in some cases, scientists are constantly looking for new methods of simple and painless diagnostics. According to Medical News Today, a new method of lung cancer detection has been developed. The authors of this method are scientists from Medical School of Boston University.

They propose to take a smear from the nose of people whose scans showed lung lesions. The smear allows us to understand the nature of the lesions, whether they are malignant or benign. A sample of epithelium covering the respiratory tract is obtained. The procedure was evaluated on patients who smoked or stopped smoking at the time of the study.

The obtained material allowed us to study the genes expression associated with cancer. According to the scientists, the nose mucosa state shows the situation in respiratory tract as a whole. This work is based on the previously discovered lung cancer marker. Now this marker can be isolated in the epithelium of bronchi.

Source: Medical News Today