An expectant mother’s bloodstream doesn’t just contain bits of free-floating DNA associated with the fetus. It’s also chock full of DNA released by her own cells. And if some of those cells are malignant, that can affect the test results – acting as a kind of unasked-for cancer screening.
A clinical trial at the National Institutes of Health [was] seeking people who had gotten these ambiguous test results when seeking information about their pregnancies.
The trial, called IDENTIFY, was designed to figure out the full range of what these results might mean, so that doctors in the future would have a better sense of what to tell their patients.
“Of the ones who have been enrolled and have had the full workup, over half of them do have a tumor,” says [researcher Diana] Bianchi. “So this is not a trivial finding. Our take home message is, this really needs to be taken seriously.”
The researchers have found a variety of malignancies. “What we’ve found most commonly is lymphoma. But we found extremely rare cancers as well, like 1-in-a-million type of cancers,” says Bianchi. One woman had a cancerous mass in her abdomen the size of a grapefruit.
