Medicine: Balloon Test

Few cancers are harder to detect in the early stages than cancer of the stomach.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association last week, Dr. George N. Papanicolaou reported that he and two associates at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center had worked out a new technique for diagnosing stomach cancer.

In theory, it should have been easy to draw off gastric juices through a tube and make a smear to find the distinctive cells which have been sloughed off by the cancer. But the results proved accurate in only one out of three cases, because nearly all the loose cancer cells went on down the intestinal tract or were destroyed by the stomach's digestive juices. Then Dr. Papanicolaou tried a device invented by Dr. Frederick G. Panico: a sausage-sized balloon with about 250 pieces of braided silk attached. The patient swallowed the balloon and about two feet of rubber tube with it. Once inside the stomach, the balloon was inflated and worked around for an hour so that the tufts of silk would pick up as many cells as possible.

Of 33 patients examined by the balloon method, operations later showed that 17 had cancer. The balloon-smear test had given a positive reaction in 14 of the cases and a suspicious reaction in one.

(The two cases in which it gave negative reports proved to have a malignancy, but it was the rare Hodgkin's disease of the stomach.) In the 16 cases with no malignancy, the test accurately reported that there was no cancer present.