A Mouth Swab for Colon Cancer Screening?
In an interesting development, researchers found that certain bacteria in the mouth were more common in people with gastric and colorectal cancers. Even more interesting, those microbial patterns identified cancer more accurately than standard fecal occult blood testing in the study.
This August 2026 study by Jang, published in Cell Host & Microbe, analyzed paired oral and fecal microbiomes and found that mouth-to-gut bacterial transmission increased in gastrointestinal cancers. The researchers developed microbiome-based classifiers that distinguished gastric and colorectal cancer from healthy controls, and in a subset with colorectal cancer, the oral microbiome model showed substantially higher sensitivity than fecal occult blood testing. The findings suggest that a simple mouth swab could one day help doctors detect certain cancers earlier—an exciting possibility that researchers are continuing to explore.
Comments