At-home spit tests are better than the standard blood test for identifying men who have a high genetic risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer, early research suggests.
The saliva test, where the sample can be collected at home, looks for genetic variants linked to prostate cancer.For men with a high genetic predisposition to the disease, spit analysis was more accurate than the PSA test as an early assessment tool, the researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust said.
Those with the highest risk scores – 558 men who carried many of these variants – were invited for further screening. In case of PSA tests, only 25% of men with a high PSA level will actually have prostate cancer, the researchers said. This is because the PSA test is not accurate enough and can falsely indicate cancer in men three out of four times.
“We know that the current PSA test can cause men to go through unnecessary treatments and, more worryingly, it’s missing men who do have cancer.