buccal swab to detect breast cancer?

Anal Quant Cytol Histol. 2005 Oct;27(5):254-62. Links

Malignancy associated changes in epithelial cells of buccal mucosa: a potential cancer detection test.

Us-Krasovec M, Erzen J, Zganec M, Strojan-Flezar M, Lavrencak J, Garner D, Doudkine A, Palcic B.

Department of Cytopathology, Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, Slovenia. mus@onko-i.si

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the presence of malignancy associated changes (MACs) in normal buccal mucosa cells of lung and breast cancer patients and their relationship to tumor subtype, stage and size. STUDY DESIGN: Buccal mucosa smears of 107 lung cancer and 100 breast cancer patients and corresponding healthy subjects were collected, stained by the DNA-specific Feulgen-thionin method and scanned using an automated high-resolution cytometer. Nuclear texture features of a minimum of 500 nuclei per slide were calculated, and statistical classifiers using Gaussian models of class-probability distribution were designed, trained and tested in 3 parts: (1) ability to separate cancer patient samples from controls, (2) cross-validation of classifiers for different cancer types, and (3) correlation of MAC expression with tumor subtype, stage and size. RESULTS: Lung and breast cancer induce MACs in normal buccal mucosa cells. The classifiers based on the selected nuclear features correctly recognized >80% of lung and breast cancer cases. The results indicate that MAC detection is not dependent on the tumor subtype, stage or size. CONCLUSION: The presence of MACs in buccal mucosa cells offers the potential for developing a new noninvasive cancer screening test.

PMID: 16447817 [PubMed - in process]

I have seen suggestions of a mouth swab test being developed at UCLA.

RB