Joyce Ares had just turned 74 and was feeling fine when she agreed to give a blood sample for research. So she was surprised when the screening test came back positive for signs of cancer.
After a repeat blood test, a PET scan and a needle biopsy, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma.
“I cried,” the retired real estate broker said. “Just a couple of tears and thought, ‘OK, now what do we do?'”
The Canby, Oregon, resident had volunteered to take a blood test that is being billed as a new frontier in cancer screening for healthy people. It looks for cancer by checking for DNA fragments shed by tumor cells.
