You can detect cancer with the help of sugar

Specialists from the University of Great Britain have told the press about a new safe method for diagnosing cancer. Doctors believe that in the near future this method will become an alternative to a radiological method harmful to the health of a sick person.

The activity of this or that zone of malignant neoplasms will be indicated by glucose. It turns out that the intensity of the division of cancer cells directly depends on the amount of sugar consumed. A standard MRI scanner will help to catch the differences in glucose concentration in cancer cells.

For patients with oncology, it is important to establish a correct diagnosis in a timely manner and to prescribe adequate treatment. Control the process of therapy is needed continuously to monitor its effectiveness. Achieving full control is difficult and even dangerous in view of the methods used: the location of the tumor is often determined by tests based on the principle of radioactive labels.

The newly developed technology is that for the detection of malignant tumor cells, ordinary sugar is used. Previously, scientists were able to find out that cancer cells need much more sugar than healthy cells. Therefore, products containing a large amount of sugar can be used as a kind of oncomarkers. A well-known fact is that a malignant tumor, due to intensive growth and increase in size, "consumes" a large amount of glucose. Cancer cells can grow several times faster if there is a lot of glucose.

At the moment, British scientists have managed to develop a completely new technology aimed at early diagnosis of malignant disease. A new diagnostic technique will detect dangerous cancer cells based on information about how many sugars "absorb" the various internal organs. For a stable increase and development of malignant cancer cells, much more sugar is required than healthy cells of the human body.

How to be with the assessment of the nature of the spread of sugar in tissues and organs? To this end, the substance is usually labeled, which may not be safe due to radioactivity. In the case of the study of glucose, scientists chose the radio wave technique "GlucoCEST". To study the distribution of sugar in this case, use a magnetic label, which fixes the MRI scanner. The principle of magnetic resonance tomography is based on the establishment of the deflection of protons as a result of electromagnetic stimulation. As is known, glucose also has protons, so MRI devices make them visible in the sugar molecule when combined with oxygen atoms.

The new method successfully passed testing on small rodents, which helped specialists to make sure of safety and low cost of the method of diagnosis. British experts believe that at the moment there is no better way to detect cancerous tumors. Moreover, doctors believe that the diagnosis will determine the presence of cancer cells in the body at the earliest stages. Researchers, who took part in the analysis of the new diagnostic method, believe that technology can become ubiquitous practice after a year and a half or two. It is important that for the passage of the "sugar test", the amount of sugar in the body can be negligible. Some physicians believe that even an injection of glucose is not required, the right amount of sugar is contained in half of the tile of dark chocolate.

Another plus of the new method is that it allows not only to detect the presence of malignant cells in the body, but also to clearly identify the boundaries of the tumor. Also, according to experts, any medical institution, where there is an MRI scanner, can afford to conduct cancer diagnostics, which, of course, will simplify the work of physicians and will save more people by detecting a cancerous tumor at an early stage.