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medpundit |
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Tuesday, April 29, 2003The test is run on four drops of urine placed on the BladderChek cassette, which is designed to detect NMP22, a protein correlated with bladder cancer. If the protein is detected, the test displays a purple line. Results are available within 30 minutes during the office visit. More than 1 million patients currently receive a diagnostic work-up for bladder cancer from urologists each year, according to Matritech. With the test now available for general screening, the company believes the market could expand to primary care physicians who would use the test in another 4million patients who present with blood in their urine. Right now, when someone presents with blood in their urine, the only way to rule out bladder cancer is to do a cystoscopy. But, in at least one study, the NMP22 urine test predicted all the cancers subsequently found on cystoscopy. It had no false negatives, but it did have some false positives (caused by recent inflammation of the urinary tract, such as kidney stones, infection, foreign bodies, etc.) It certainly would be nice to be able to screen out those people who have just a few red blood cells in their urine and who don’t need to go on for such a costly and invasive procedure as cystoscopy. (And it's CLIA-waived, so your doctor can do it in the office without being subjected to oppressive government regulation.) posted by Sydney on 4/29/2003 08:15:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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