Bladder EpiCheck® included in the EAU Clinical Guidelines
Bladder EpiCheck® is a urine marker panel used in the monitoring of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) to reduce the number of unnecessary cystoscopies. This simple, non-invasive and accurate urine test is newly included in 2022 European Association of Urology (EAU) Clinical Guidelines on NMIBC. The EAU guidelines aim to provide practical recommendations on the clinical management of NMIBC, to assist physicians in making informed treatment decisions with available scientific data. The EAU guidelines state that urinary biomarker tests with high sensitivity and negative predictive values for high-grade disease, including a specific reference to Bladder EpiCheck, might be used to replace and/or postpone cystoscopies in low- and intermediate-risk NMIBC, and reduce the number of cystoscopies in this patient population.
Bladder EpiCheck demonstrated the best performance out of the guideline-recommended markers as measured by diagnostic odds ratios in the recent meta-analysis published in European Urology Oncology1. Bladder EpiCheck analyzes subtle disease-specific changes in DNA methylation markers, allowing for the detection of 91%1 of the high-risk cancers. High risk cancers2 are important to catch as they are aggressive and most likely to progress to invasive cancer if not treated immediately. Bladder EpiCheck has demonstrated a negative predictive value (NPV) of 99% for high-grade cancer, meaning that when receiving a negative Bladder EpiCheck result, there is 99% chance that no high-grade cancer is present1. Overall specificity of Bladder EpiCheck is 85%, ensuring a low rate of false positive results.
Bladder EpiCheck is an objective molecular test meaning that it does not rely on human interpretation. The result is a clear positive/negative for presence of bladder cancer, with additional numerical results between 0-100. The results are not affected by BCG treatment, hematuria or infections.
Aidian is the proud distributor of the Bladder EpiCheck test in the Nordics. More details about the test can be found from product webpages:
Contact us at aidian@aidian.eu for more information on Bladder EpiCheck.
References
- Laukhtina et al., Corrigendum to ‘‘Diagnostic Accuracy of Novel Urinary Biomarker Tests in Non–muscle-invasive Bladder Cancer: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis’’ [Eur Urol Oncol 2021;4:927–42], Eur Urol Oncol (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euo.2022.01.003
- EAU (European Association of Urology) Guidelines: Non-muscle-invasive Bladder Cancer. Available at: https://uroweb.org/guidelines/non-muscle-invasive-bladder-cancer/chapter/diagnosis