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Pancreatic cancer may be identified using a stool sample, offering a simple, non-invasive method to detecting this hard-to-treat disease.
Since pancreatic cancer is the 12th most common cancer worldwide and is set to become even more common over the next few decades, the researchers are hopeful the new method of testing could help to easily identify more people with the disease.
The most common form of the disease is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma for which the outlook is poor, with fewer than one in 20 of those affected surviving five or more years.
This is largely because the disease often doesn’t cause symptoms in the early stage, so when a diagnosis is made, the cancer is often advanced.
Since scans, tissue specimens and urine and blood samples are most commonly used to diagnose it, the researchers say less invasive ways of detecting the disease at an early stage are urgently needed.
The microbial profile was able to identify those with early and advanced stage cancers
The research, published in the journal Gut, analysed 100 spit and 212 stool samples, as well as pancreatic tissue from 57 Spanish adults newly diagnosed with the ductal form before treatment, 25 of which had early stage cancer and 32 with advanced disease.
The control group consisted of 50 health people matched for age and sex, and 29 people with chronic pancreatitis, a known risk factor for pancreatic cancer.
The researchers found that gut microbes were more informative than mouth microbes, and after accounting for known risk factors, a distinct microbial profile was observed in the stool samples of people with ductal pancreatic cancer compared with people with chronic pancreatitis and those without either disease.
The microbial profile was able to consistently identify patients with the disease, no matter what stage of cancer they had. This suggests the profile emerges early on and the stool sample may be able to identify those with early stages of the disease.
“Significant progress” for non-invasive cancer detection
While the researchers say there are “strong indications” that the test could be used to identify patients with pancreatic cancer, they warn that the data are strictly “observational and cross-sectional”.
Nevertheless, they are hopeful the research could provide “promising future entry points for disease prevention and therapeutic intervention.”
In a linked commentary, Drs Rachel Newsome and Christian Jobin of the University of Florida, say that although the findings are “promising” more research will need to be done to confirm the results.
They said: “Although promising, these findings have limited clinical value due to the cross-sectional nature of the study, and thus the predictive markers will need to be tested using a prospective cohort before reaching a conclusion on their clinical impact.”
Even so, they say the research “represents an important contribution” to cancer research and further signifies “significant progress for non-invasive cancer detection.”