Researchers from the asbestos Disease Research Institute (ADRI) in Sydney, Australia have recently identified a blood test that measures a mesothelioma patient’s overall prospect for survival.
According to ADRI director professor Nico van Zandwijk, “It is a biomarker in the blood – the lymphocyte and neutrophil ratio – which is also found to be predictive in other malignant diseases, even in heart disease.”
In the past, doctors have experienced difficulty in evaluating a good prognosis versus a poor one in malignant mesothelioma patients. In many cases, patients have undergone debilitating treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy that make their lives unnecessarily difficult.
Professor van Zandwijk said, “This helps to individualize treatment approaches. A patient who has a poor prognostic profile with that marker, we would like to be very careful making plans for radical or chemotherapy treatment. For those patients with a better prognosis we would like to reserve more intense treatment for them.”
Additional research is currently underway at ADRI with the hope of identifying biomarkers that do not just point to survival, but to a patient’s sensitivity to specific anti-cancer drugs and treatments. The overall purpose is to provide tailored treatments for each individual patient.
As the number of mesothelioma cases diagnosed each year is expected to peak within the next decade, findings such as the one from ADRI are very important to improving survival rates. There is no current cure for mesothelioma and patients normally only survive between four and 18 months after diagnosis.
Additional information about mesothelioma may be found through the mesothelioma Center.