Nat Med: The number of copies of the genome can predict the transformation of esophageal cancer years in advance.

Early diagnosis of cancer is one of the best strategies to improve patient survival and reduce treatment-related side effects, however, it carries the risk of overtreated treatment.
, we need biomarkers of accurate early cancer progression to stratide patients.
number of copies (CN), which are common in cancer but rarely found in normal tissues, raise questions about whether these signals can help patients diagnose early.
this strategy can be tested in esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), which has a five-year survival rate of less than 20 percent.
its pre-body tissue is called Barrett's esobar (BE).
, the risk of progressing to EAC in BE patients is only about 0.3% per year.
current monitoring program focuses on the level of stunting and stunting in BE patients, which is determined by biopsy histological pathology.
(LGD) and advanced stunting (HGD) are used as pronouns for early cancer transformation and trigger intervention, usually through endoscopic excision and radio frequency ablation (RFA).
risk factors for progress include age, male sex, longer BE segments and smoking during initial assessment, but these are not yet part of clinical guidelines.
, improvements in risk assessment have focused on identifying individual molecular biomarkers, in particular p53 expression and DNA methylation changes.
, however, the identification progression of mutant biomarkers has been difficult due to its low frequency of mutations at the recurrence point of BE or EAC.
, EAC and BE are characterized by early and frequent genomic (CN and structural) instability.
recently, researchers published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine evaluating whether genomic signals such as non-whole timesheds and drive gene mutations can be used for early detection and early cancer treatment, using the tumor pregeniopath Barrett esother as an example.
researchers sampled 88 Barrett eso ate tube monitoring patients and sequenced 777 biopsy samples with shallow whole genomes over a 15-year period.
results show that genomic signals can distinguish between progression and stabilization diseases even 10 years before tissue pathological transformation.
were validated in two separate queues of 76 and 248 patients, respectively.
method used in this study is low cost and suitable for standard clinical biopsy samples.
Compared to current management guidelines based on histological pathology and clinical manifestations, genomic classification can lead to earlier treatment for high-risk patients and reduce unnecessary treatment and monitoring of patients who are less likely to develop cancer.
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