Ovarian cancer is much more curable if detected early, but the disease doesn’t usually produce symptoms until it is advanced and current blood tests are not very sensitive in picking it up. A new test may improve the situation, researchers have shown.

Blood levels of a protein called YKL-40 are more accurate than standard tests for other proteins - CA125 and CA15-3 - for detecting early-stage ovarian cancer, Dr. Jakob Dupont of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and colleagues report.

The team measured YKL-40 in blood samples from 46 healthy women, 61 women at high risk for ovarian cancer, 33 women with non-malignant gynecologic disorders, and 50 pre-operative patients subsequently diagnosed with early ovarian cancer. The investigators also measured CA125 and CA15-3 levels.

“YKL-40 levels distinguished normal individuals and high-risk patients from ovarian cancer patients very reliably,” the authors report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

They note that YKL levels were high in 72 percent of the women with early ovarian cancer, while CA125 levels were elevated in only 46 percent and CA15-3 levels in only 26 percent.

The YKL assay “has the advantage of being commercially available, easily reproducible, and inexpensive,” Jakob and colleagues add.

Further studies of YKL-40 are warranted, they say, “to define the performance of the marker throughout the history of an ovarian cancer patient, including preoperative, postoperative, chemotherapy, and tumor-monitoring periods.”

SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Oncology, August 15, 2004