MORE: 10 Cancer Symptoms Most Women Ignore Tampons as cancer detection tools sounds crazy, but the idea was first identified in a 2004 study. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic wanted to expand on that research, so they devised a new study and enrolled 66 women. All of the women were scheduled to have a hysterectomy, with 38 of the women having the surgery because they had endometrial cancer, and the other 28 going under the knife for benign reasons. Study subjects were asked to insert a tampon, which would collect vaginal secretions that could be analyzed by the research team. The results: signs of molecular markers of cancer were more likely to be found in the secretions gathered from the tampons of the women already diagnosed with endometrial cancer. And tampons were just as accurate at detecting these markers as the traditional endometrial cancer test, which is an invasive procedure that scrapes cell samples from the uterus (ouch). MORE: 4 Women Share What It’s Like to Have Colon Cancer So how soon will your tampon be able to diagnose cancer? Not so fast. First, researchers need to do more studies; a clinical trial is underway right now, says lead study author Jamie Bakkum-Gamez, MD, a gynecological oncologist at the Mayo Clinic. Currently, there’s no routine way to screen for endometrial cancer (aside from reporting vague symptoms to your doctor, such as irregular bleeding), which strikes more than 50,000 women each year, most of them post-menopausal, and is the most common gynecological cancer in the U.S., according to the study. And though it might be years away, Bakkum-Gamez says the goal is to devise a tampon test for endometrial cancer women can use in their own homes. “We hope to come up with a test that’s easy for women to use without a doctor, and then mail to a lab themselves, so endometrial cancer can be caught early,” she says. The article “Are Tampons the New Pap Smear?” originally ran on Womenshealthmag.com. MORE: What You Need to Know About the Number One Cancer Killer of Women
