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Fewer false-positive pregnancy results with intact hCG

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IN CANCER PATIENTS, 90 PERCENT OF FALSE-POSITIVES ELIMINATED

Anne Paxton

April 2018—When women of childbearing age check in at a cancer center where they might be undergoing medical or surgical treatment, the screening protocol is often to test them for pregnancy, primarily by quantifying serum β-hCG. But because a form of the β-hCG subunit can also be produced by several epithelial cancers, false-positive pregnancy results are more common in patients who have cancer.

With the use of a different test, most of those false-positives can be avoided, a new study conducted at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center suggests. The study, “Reducing False-Positive Pregnancy Test Results in Patients with Cancer,” found that 90 percent of false-positives were eliminated when the samples were tested with intact human chorionic gonadotropin, says lead author Samuel I. McCash, MD, of the Department of Laboratory Medicine.

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