Urine Test to Detect Lung Cancer
It used to be a widely accepted fact that smoking is a more than sure way of diagnosing lung cancer but that has been proven to be a very inaccurate way of judging the disease’s existence. Urine is the waste product of the body containing liquid waste as well as hormones and other by-products of the human body’s normal functions. A certain metabolite of hormone named NNAL has been found to be a very accurate way of determining the existence of lung cancer which is produced by the body when the disease is present.
The study spanned urine collection from a specified body of test subjects over a period of ten years that showed the inaccuracies of the smoking adage. The study shows that from 50,000 test subjects, 246 who smoked, developed lung cancer and 245 did not, the other half being the control for statistical analysis. Tobacco smoke is known to contain more or less 60 carcinogenic substances, each of them having a different mechanism and each able to induce a different form of cancer. Using urine and marker tests loaded with a specific antigen that reacts with the metabolite is going to be a more reliable way of detecting the disease, opposed to popular belief.