Following the drug that does wonders for the breast cancer female patients, researchers have made a new discovery aimed at men this time.

Maria Aurora Sanchini, M.Sc., of Morgagni-Pierantoni Hospital, Forlì, Italy, and colleagues conducted a study to define the diagnostic accuracy of different telomerase activity cutoff values in terms of sensitivity and specificity.

Established approaches for detecting bladder cancer are either invasive and costly or have limited sensitivity, highlighting the need for the development of a noninvasive, reliable, and simple test to increase the rate of detection of bladder cancer. Among the markers investigated for this purpose has been telomerase (a certain enzyme) activity in urine.

The incidence of human bladder cancer has greatly increased, with more than 60,000 new cases diagnosed annually in just the United States, and now represents the 4th most common malignancy in men and the 10th most common in women.

At present, about 20 percent of patients die each year, but when the disease is diagnosed and treated in its early stage, the chances of survival are good.

"The test we developed requires a small amount of urine; is noninvasive, inexpensive, and easy to perform; and permits a quantitative evaluation of telomerase activity in cellular extracts from urine. Furthermore, it is objective, reproducible, and specific and is not reliant on the expertise of the cytopathologist. Indeed, one important advantage of this test is its proven ability to also identify low-grade tumors, which often escape detection, thus largely contributing to false-negatives in cytologic examination," the researchers write.