SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Cancer Blood Test Is Unsuccessful

Four years ago, a new test that seemed to detect all forms of cancer from tiny blood samples appeared destined to revolutionize the way doctors screen people for the disease. Now, many specialists doubt the method will ever live up to its promise. For reasons they cannot explain, the test seems to work only in the hands of the physician who invented it.

In 1986, Dr. Eric T. Fossel of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital said he had found a way to tell whether a patient had cancer simply by examining a bit of his blood in a nuclear magnetic resonance scanner. It would detect tumors too small to feel or spot on X-rays.

Two studies published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine--the journal that first described Fossel’s apparent breakthrough--are the latest to add to the mounting evidence against it.

“We were unable to determine whether or not a person had cancer based on the blood test,” Dr. Paul Okunieff of Massachusetts General Hospital said.

Terje Engan directed a Norwegian group from the University of Trondheim that conducted a similar comparison of blood from 104 cancer patients and 164 healthy people. When the people studied were the same sex and age, the test could not distinguish those with cancer from those without.