Evaluation of diagnostic tests for cancer. III. Inhibition of thermal coagulation of serum by iodoacetic acid (the Huggins-Miller-Jensen test)
✍ Scribed by F. Homburger; Paul H. Pfeiffer; Otto Page; George P. Rizzone; Joseph Benotti; Patricia Coteau
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1950
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 818 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0008-543X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Detroit (April 16, 1949), Huggins3 reviewed the present knowledge of plasma proteins in cancer from the point of view of their importance as "diagnostic agents.'' At the end of this address, he discussed the mechanisms of the "deficient coagulative ability of cancer serum" and its more refined" measurement by "measuring the inhibition of thermal coagulation by iodoacetate." He stated specifically (although this sentence does not appear in the printed version of the address) that "newspapers notwithstanding, this is not a diagnostic test." I n their paper on deficient coagulation in cancer and the iodoacetate index, Huggins, Miller, and JensenG cautiously stated that The coagulation reaction is not specific as a diagnostic instrument although we h a w found it to be rather useful. From a practical standpoint, the difficulty is not in the failure to recognize active malignant disease, but in the false positive reactions." In a mimeographed circular referring to their paper in Cancer Research, Huggins, Miller, and Jensen5 later pointed out that '(one cannot say on the basis of these tests that a given patient has or does not have cancer. The determination of