Pathology of Interest – Ten Key Tests for Cancer Patients’ Wellbeing

In this episode, Carla introduces essential pathology tests that help her patients understand their health status and wellbeing, with a focus on those affected by cancer. These tests provide insight into various body systems and offer a powerful approach for patients to engage in their care. Each test has unique purposes, from tracking immune function to detecting inflammation or nutrient deficiencies and can be valuable even for those without cancer.

Here are the key tests Carla recommends:

1. Full Blood Examination (FBE) – Provides a snapshot of blood health, showing red and white cell counts, and platelets, which help assess immune function, anaemia and blood-related cancers like leukaemia.

2. General Biochemistry Panel – Examines kidney and liver function, electrolytes, and detox pathways, offering insight into nutrition and how well the body is functioning overall.

3. Vitamin D – Low vitamin D is linked to poor prognosis in cancer patients, making this test essential for those undergoing treatment.

4. HbA1c – Measures average blood glucose over 2-3 months and helps understand blood sugar management, which can influence cancer progression.

5. ESR (Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate) – Detects inflammation in the body, which can be a sign of immune disorders or blood cancers.

6. ANA (Antinuclear Antibodies) – Checks for antibodies that mistakenly attack healthy cells, relevant in immune system function and some cancer types.

7. Cancer Markers – Specific markers like PSA, CEA, CA125, CA15.3, and CA 19.9 can indicate cancer activity, providing early detection or monitoring during treatment.

8. Iron Studies – Iron and ferritin levels reveal more than anaemia; they’re key in oxygen distribution, energy, and overall vitality.

9. B12 Levels – Essential for energy, red blood cell formation, and detoxification, especially important for cancer patients.

10. FitGenes Health & Wellbeing Report – Offers a personalized genetic profile to help tailor diet, exercise and lifestyle choices based on individual DNA, supporting overall health and resilience.

Additional Tests Discussed:

- Hormone Profiles (DUTCH Test) – For complex hormone assessments through dried urine samples.

- Microbiome Testing – Reveals the relationship between microbiome health and cancer, affecting areas like vaginal, urinary, oral, gastrointestinal and even tumour microbiomes.

- RGCC Onconomics Plus – Provides personalized data on effective drugs and natural substances against cancer cells, guiding tailored treatment options.

Next Episode Preview: Carla explains how these tests provide vital information and empower patients to take an active role in their care. Join us in the next episode, where Carla will explore pathology of interest in more depth, helping listeners understand the power of tracking their own health.

Find PROSPER Natural Cancer CARE on Instagram @prosper.cancer.care or visit www.prospercancercare.co.

For more information or to get in touch, connect with Carla on Instagram @carlawrenn or visit www.carlawrenn.com.

Disclaimer: This podcast is intended to be informational only and represents the opinion of the participants, but not necessarily their workplace. It is not intended to be used as medical advice and does not take the place of advice from a qualified health care practitioner in a clinical setting. Please check with your healthcare practitioner before embarking upon any of the treatments or lifestyle changes discussed.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Prosper Natural Cancer Care. I'm Carla Wren. We discuss naturopathic cancer care, integrative oncology, and lifestyle medicine. Examining complementary medicine tradition, science, evidence-based personalized health care for people with cancer. If you or a loved one has a cancer diagnosis, or you're a professional with an interest in complementary medicine or cancer care, you've come to the right place. Let's prosper. But before we start today, let's take a moment to define the word prosper and why it's an important word for me in the work I do. Prosper is defined as to flourish physically, grow strong and healthy, to become strong and flourishing, to cause to succeed or thrive. These words and words like choose hope are important to me as I aim to empower, educate and encourage people in my practice and on this podcast. Please be sure to take a moment at the end of today's show to listen to the very important disclaimer. Welcome to Prosper Natural Cancer Care. Today we're going to be talking about pathology of interest and the 10 tests I love my patients with cancer to do to understand their overall health and well-being. So let's just dive into the pathology of interest and let me help you start to understand your own pathology. This is important and powerful even if you don't have cancer. The first test I love my patients to run is often completed in a general health assessment done by the GP for patients with or without cancer when they're doing perhaps an annual or biannual blood check, and I do recommend all my patients do this. So a full blood examination or full blood count is a routine test that can be used to assess your general health or to check on a variety of disorders that affect blood cells. The full blood count and measures the size of various cells in your blood. These include red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Each have specific functions and assessing them can give us important information. A full blood count can detect some blood or immune system cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, but it can't detect solid cancers like lung, breast, or colon cancer. It can tell your provider how your body responds to treatment. And this is something that's monitored if you're looking for neutropenia or other effects on the immune system that might be a sign of toxicity or a need to pause your treatment during chemotherapy. And this can also help us understand whether or not cancer may have spread to your bone marrow. So a great one to do shows signs of viruses and bacterial infraction, gives a little bit of information about your nutrition in terms of iron and ferritin status through the hemoglobin. So great test to get done. My next favorite, number two, is general biochemistry. This looks at kidney, liver, electrolytes, and detoxification. The biochemical changes help in study the pathology of any disease. Biochemistry helps to understand the functioning and role of many things, including vitamins, in the body. Therefore, with the help of the biochemistry, one can find the perfect nutritional intake to help to maintain good health, but also ensure that the liver and kidneys are functioning well, not overburdened. We can check things like are you having enough protein? And this can give a really good guide around how to manage yourself, particularly when you're on some more aggressive treatments or having issues with nausea, vomiting, uh, getting good food in. And so general biochemistry, while it's great for an oncology patient, is also great to monitor things like fatty liver disease and kidney function and other general metrics in the healthy patient, too. My next favorite test is vitamin D. And in cancer patients, low vitamin D is linked to a poor prognosis. So we want to see a really robust vitamin D level. When patients come to me, their standard vitamin D level is somewhere around, you know, 25 at a very low to 75, which would be considered quite normal. And we really want those levels to be 100, you know, not really higher than 150, but somewhere around that level. And so we use blood tests to monitor that. And if vitamin D is low, it gives me a great target to start to work on because vitamin D, you may know, is so essential to the immune system for well-being, but also in oncology care. My next favorite test is called HBA1C. And this is a test that often hasn't been done if someone's recently diagnosed or has already been treating for cancer for quite a while. Our HBA1C is one that perhaps is more of a functional test, traditionally used to look for type 2 diabetes. But HBA1C in the context of integrated oncology is used to understand for me what your diet's like. You know, it gives us a look at your average blood glucose over the last three months. Um, and if that average is above the ideal indicator level for me, then it tells me that your level is perhaps suggesting that your diet is too high in glucose, carbohydrate, not enough protein and healthy fat, that there's issues with insulin resistance, or even maybe a prediabetic or diabetic diagnosis. And so we want to get that under control because balancing blood glucose to optimal level is part of the plan we have to improve prognosis and well-being. The next test I love is again a test that's perhaps not commonly performed on a standard blood test. It's called ESR, stands for erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and it's a blood test that shows if you have inflammation in your body. Inflammation in your is your immune system's response to injury and infection and many types of conditions, including immune system disorders, certain cancers and blood disorders, but also things like arthritis. And so understanding what the erythrocytes, which are a red blood cell, is doing and how their settling is the measure in millimeters for S ESR, tells us about chronic inflammation. And if you've read about the hallmarks of cancer or some of the other metabolic processes that occur in cancer that reduce the prognosis, you will know that blood glucose and inflammation are frequently discussed topics. And this is my best way of assessing them simply and inexpensively for my patients. The next test I love is called ANA. It stands for anti-nuclear antibodies. An antibody is a protein that your immune system makes to find foreign fight foreign substances such as viruses and bacteria. But an anti-nuclear antibody attacks your own healthy cells instead. It's called antinuclear because it targets its nucleus, the center of the cells, and healthy cells don't want their nucleus targeted. This is a marker for autoimmune disease. And while I hope most of my oncology patients are not suffering from concurrent autoimmune diseases, throughout the process that can happen into the lead up of cancer, especially if the cancer is at a later stage when it's diagnosed, we can sometimes see comorbidities, including autoimmune disease. And to best help the patient feel well, we want to address those independently of the oncology diagnosis so that the two don't have a negative impact on each other, particularly when it comes to some of the treatments that may be offered to patients who are on a cancer treatment strategy. So I always like to check anti-nuclear antibodies if it hasn't been done recently on a standard pathology test. The seventh test that I love is cancer markers. Now, cancer markers are a little bit controversial. They're used quite frequently for prostate cancer and monitoring men in the stage or age that might be likely to be susceptible to prostate cancer. PSA is monitored for increasing in numbers and really a tripling of PSA over a three-month period is a sign that there's definitely some activity happening, but any increases in PSA should be assessed. And so PSA is a cancer marker that's more commonly used, but there are other cancer markers including CEA, CA125, CA15.3, and CA19.9. And these are less frequently used as monitoring because they often can be seen to be inaccurate. So not everyone's cancer markers will accurately allow them to be red flagged for a further assessment or suggest progression. CEA is commonly associated with some of the abdominal cancers, colorectal cancer in particular, and CA125, 15.3 and 19.9 are most commonly associated with female cancers, including breast and ovarian cancer, but not limited to those. And the cancer markers will be used by some oncologists and not others. But if they are being monitored, I will utilize that monitoring to also understand how my patient is progressing and if we need to make changes to their treatment plan. And so very helpful for some patients, not used in others. If you are on a cancer treatment strategy and you have an oncologist, you could ask them if they're using cancer markers to monitor you. And if not, why not? And get a good answer to help understand the use of cancer markers for you. My next favorite test is number eight, iron studies. So this looks at iron and ferritin and some saturation markers. And this is not just for anemia. This is also about oxygen distribution, hemoglobin in the full blood examination panel correlates to iron studies and energy, and we don't want too much or too little iron and ferritin. This can tell us a lot about how a patient might be feeling fatigued-wise and also how they're coping with their treatment. And if other nutritional deficiencies, including iron, but also not limited to B vitamins, could perhaps be affecting the way patients are feeling. I don't normally supplement iron during active treatment, and this is something to speak to your healthcare practitioner about. So if you notice your iron studies are low, don't just go and grab an iron. It's important that we make sure it's an appropriate time to use a supplement and that this reason for low iron is or higher and is indicative of many things. And we really want to get to the bottom of it rather than just use this as an indication to take a tablet. But nonetheless, worthwhile doing, particularly if you're feeling fatigued. And so that leads me into my ninth favorite test, B12. And as for iron, B12 can affect your red blood cells, iron, hemoglobin, and also detoxification, along with other B vitamins like B9, folate, choline, all have an impact on detoxification. And so we want to get these B vitamins sorted out. They can also be low during treatment. A lot of drugs affect B vitamin levels, and we want the B12 to be robust. And some of the other B vitamins are associated with protection against peripheral neuropathy. So definitely a worth one checking. Just like iron, low B12 can have a significant impact on lots of systems throughout the body, but particularly energy. Now, my tenth favorite test is something called the FitGenes Health and Wellbeing Profile. And this health and well-being report by FitGenes, a Melbourne-based company, is a comprehensive analysis of your personal genetic profile and how the variance in your genes can influence your fitness and general health. And so FitGenes will review specifically selected genes in the epigenetic panels to assist you and your practitioner to determine if diet and lifestyle choices you're making suit your DNA. And it also outlines gene variations and where there is peer-reviewed science suggesting the benefits of particular nutrigenomics or nutrient interventions. Remember, many genetic variations can manage or compensate for your health, and your practitioner, whether it be myself or another practitioner, may use FitGenes to help to determine what's the best treatment for you. Fit genes aims to identify any variants in genes that might have a physiological pathway that influences how your body functions overall. So it's great to use for well patients too, but also how you might respond to what you eat and how you exercise and how well you could live your life, especially in relation to a couple of key panels. We look at panels including things like inflammation, cellular defense, vitamin D status, detoxification, methylation, cardiovascular health, thermogenesis and metabolism, and all of these, particularly areas like inflammation, cell defense, methylation, detoxification, are all really important to understand when a patient has cancer. And I love to be able to personalize their strategy, especially around inflammation. We often find that the epigenetic, nutrigenomic research evidence recommendations are quite different to what we would normally consider to use in an oncology patient. And so fine-tuning and personalizing my prescription is a great way I find to get even better results and really empower my patient. So I do love FitGenes as one of my favorite tests. And so, like any naturopath, being asked to choose only 10 favorite pathology tests was like being asked to pick your favorite child. You can't pick. So here are a few more cancer type-specific testing I love in the functional medicine space. So the next would be hormonal profiling. The Dutch and other salivary and urine functional tests, including the advanced dried urine tests for hormones, is an ideal test to help understand the complex hormones of patients. And this is really important in cancers where there is a strong hormonal involvement, particularly cancers like breast cancer, that may be determined by the biopsy to be hormonally responsive. So a comprehensive hormone panel, like the Dutch test, is a unique way that we can reveal so much from a simple urine or salivary collection. The profiling separates off into four different samples, most commonly, that are done over different times of the day and can be used to understand a comprehensive overview of the patient's hormonal status and try and find underlying issues that may be related to the complex nature of hormones within the system and whether or not there are particular pathways that are not encouraging hormone clearance, ensuring that the patient has a higher level of circulating hormones than is desirable and may be predictive or preventative in our way of addressing and assessing why this cancer came about in a patient. And when combined with lots of other information, may give us a real driver we can start to address for this patient, whether or not they're already undergoing treatment. And so it's a great one to do, especially in stress patients, because there's a whole panel on cortisol and understanding adrenal endocrine function as well as reproductive endocrine function. My next favorite test is the microbiome testing. And the question is not which cancer type is impacted by the microbiome. Testing really is helping us to understand all cancers and the impact of microbiome. Vaginal, urinary, oral, gastrointestinal, and tumor microbiome are all tests we can consider. And it really fascinates me that no one is talking more about microbiome and oncology with huge amounts of research suggesting that microbiome and cancer is the way of the future. And I'll be talking about this more in an upcoming podcast. Some other tests I enjoy but do less frequently is the RGCC test, which is a test for patients seeking personalized cancer treatment, where this test has the ability to detect early signs of developing cancers. It can be used to help monitor existing cancers and produce an individualized profile of chemotherapeutic drugs and natural supplements that might be able to achieve the best treatment outcomes for this patient. If the RGCC is something that interests you, please speak to me about it in a consultation because there's certain situations where I think it's beneficial and others where I wouldn't recommend it. The same as the all testing, you know, understanding the information you're going to get from the test and what that test is going to do to change your treatment outcome and how empowering that test may be or how worrying that test might be are all things that we want to understand. But the RGCT and the Onconomics Plus, one of the tools that I'll use, look at three methods of kind of looking at the direct cytotoxic effect, looking at things that stimulate the immune system, and looking at ways of inhibiting proliferation signaling in cancer cells, and really can be helped to monitor cancers. So whatever stage you or your loved ones are in in a cancer diagnosis or just trying to stay well, these are great pathology tests. Might be ones you've already had done that we can deep dive into, or it might be something that you would like help getting done to understand the cause of many health conditions, not just cancer. So I hope you found this information helpful. Go grab your blood tests and see if you can see any of this on your most recent pathology. And in the next episode, I'll be discussing the cancer care team and who I love referring to. For more information on Prosper Natural Cancer Care, visit prospercancercare.co. For more information and to get in touch, please visit Carren.com. Disclaimer. This podcast is intended to be informational only and represents the opinion of the participants, but not necessarily their workplace. It is not intended to be used as medical advice and does not take the place of advice from a qualified health practitioner in a clinical setting. Please check with your healthcare practitioner before embarking upon any of the treatments or lifestyle changes discussed.