Medical professionals: Cancer and standard blood test from a physical?
Posted on May 27, 2008 under cancer news and reports |Hi, For those of you who are medical professionals, would a standard blood panel that you are given during a physical be likely to raise red flags if a person has (undiagnosed) cancer somewhere in their body? I don't know what they look for in these blood tests, but I'm just wondering if it they can help catch a disease like cancer during the early stages.
May 27th, 2008 at 6:58 am
For leukemia, we look for lots and lots of immature white blood cells. Cells have a certain maturation sequence that passes through different stages during which the cell has a characteristic appearance. There are no immature white blood cells that appear on a blood smear from peripheral blood (slide) that are considered normal. If the cancer is localized to a particular organ, you could see cells of that organ present in the blood, but again it would be a cell that is present in an abnormally high concentration considering where the blood came from. Immature WBCs are normal in bone marrow. Hepatocytes (liver cells) are normal if looking at a liver biopsy but abnormal in circulating blood. So to answer your question, we look for cells that don't belong in your blood at a high concentration.