Does blood in your urine mean you have cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Blood in your urine, so-called hematuria, is fairly common, with a new genetic test being studied to rule out bladder cancer as a cause. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says such a test would allow people to forgo an invasive test called cystoscopy for hematuria.

Nelson: It's common enough that we can't do cystoscopy on everybody. Some aspects of it have changed. There were times when blood in the urine might reflect kidney stones and stuff and so there's a bunch of clinical scenarios you want to be able to dissect and to use things that are scalable to offices and to even home tests ultimately perhaps it's going to be very helpful.            :20

Nelson suspects such a genetic test will roll out soon.

 Nelson: They use the DNA methylation test looking at shed DNA and cells that are in the urine that might have been cancer cells they had an 89% sensitivity 88% specificity. That level of sensitivity and specificity is very encouraging.           :14

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.