The system is in response to recent discoveries of wrong test results on Canadian women at labs in Newfoundland and Labrador which failed to detect for several years errors of a breast cancer test.
It has passed two pilot tests and may soon be implemented across Canada at a time when there are widespread calls for a nationwide, government-backed strategy that would mandate laboratories to have a secondary proof of the accuracy of sensitive cancer tests done on patients.
Discovered by Blake Giks, the head of anatomic pathology at Vancouver General Hospital, and Robert Wolber, medical discipline leader for anatomic pathology at the Vancouver Coastal Health, the system has a 95 percent accuracy. It uses thin slices of tissues taken from a paraffin block filled with 200 small cores of various tissue samples. With the large volume of test tumors, researchers have a better chance of acquiring more accurate information compared with tests done on only one to two tumors.
In that way the test can catch misinterpretations at labs within weeks instead of months or years.
Meanwhile, the Cancer Quality Council of Ontario said between August 2005 and December 2007 wait times for cancer surgery went down by 17 percent to 20 days from 24 days. For the same period, 83 percent of Canadians who waited for radiation received it within nationally recommended time frames.
What needs more improvement, according to Michael Decter, chair of the CQCO, is personal behavior modification which could halve incidents of cancers through preventive measures. Those measures include smoking, excessive exposure to the sun, better diet, alcohol consumption and lack of exercise.
