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SAN ANTONIO — A new test to predict an ordinary woman’s odds of getting breast cancer works better than a method doctors have relied on for decades, researchers reported Friday.

The test is the first to mingle dozens of genes and corporal factors such as date and childbearing to gauge peril in women who don’face to face have a strong race history of the disease. Women without a house history account for three-fourths of all cases.

In a California study to restrain its validity, the test correctly classified 50 percent more women with breast cancer as high put to hazard than the present method did and strictly scored others sink. Results were given at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

But don’confidentially rush out to possess it, cancer specialists said. Even though this test and single others claiming to predict risk are available, more study is needed to prove their integrity, they said.

“The market is essence flooded with all these tests material the whole of these claims,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy-chief medical official for the American Cancer Society.

“There’s no ‘Consumer Reports’ of genetic testing” to rate their accuracy and value, he related.

Women and doctors have long wished for a simple test that could reveal risk beyond the two BRCA genes, which tend to cause cancer at in season ages but account for only a few percent of all cases. In the past year, four companies started selling broader multigene tests, but their value is widely disputed.

Women thought to be at high risk can get more frequent mammograms or MRI scans to order for money for mammary organ cancer, or contemplate hormone-blocking drugs such as tamoxifen. But even some advocates for better stoppage approaches don’t think gene tests are a good idea until more is known about the most judicious options.

The company that makes the new OncoVue test — Oklahoma City-based InterGenetics — aims to duck animadversion by offering it only through doctors rather than directly to consumers and validating it in population studies like the individual reported Friday.

The $397 test looks for 22 single-letter variations in 19 genes that possess been linked to breast cancer. The test is offered through 33 sites around the country, said Eldon Jupe, a geneticist and co-founder of the company.

Women fill out a questionnaire and practice a mouthwash that releases cheek cells that are spit into a test tube and analyzed. A computer model weighs these factors to twenty cancer risk.

The test incorporates parts of the risk-assessment hireling that scientists and doctors use now: the Gail type, named after the National Cancer Institute biostatistician who developed it 20 years past, Dr. Mitchell Gail. The factors include age, how many close relatives have had breast cancer and while a woman started having periods or first gave birth.

It’s a crude model and studies esteem shown its numerous company limitations, yet doctors and researchers rely on it so heavily that the Internet position for it is accessed 25,000 times a month, said Dr. Lynn Hartmann, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

“Better risk prediction is a huge destitution,” she said.

The reinvigorated study’s leader, Dr. Kathie Dalessandri, a scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, wanted to call on if OncoVue could outperform the Gail model in predicting risk in women in nearby Marin County, where breast-cancer rates hold been lofty.

“It’s been a puzzle for some time as to why,” and BRCA genes do not explain it, Dalessandri aforesaid.

She did a previous study of 169 Marin County women diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s and 177 women of similar age, weight and other factors identified through random phone calls. The Gail image was of little help sorting out why some had cancer and others did not.

For the new study, she used OncoVue upon the body stored samples from that hardship. OncoVue was 2 1/2 times better at separating high- and low-risk women than the Gail model had been.

“It’s an encouraging validation study,” but needs more research in other population groups, said Dr. Kelly Marcom, who runs Duke University’s Hereditary Cancer Clinic.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved gene tests and is taking into account guidelines notwithstanding doing so. In the meantime, it has allowed many to be sold below existing rules that govern lab testing.

Some insurers cover some tests.