WID-easy Patient Information

A Breakthrough test for Endometrial Cancer: Accurate, Rapid & Simple.

What is WID®-easy?

Is WID®-easy for me?

The WID-easy test has been designed for peri-menopausal and post-menopausal women who are experiencing abnormal bleeding. Developed by researchers at University College London in partnership with the UK's largest gynae cancer charity, The Eve Appeal, WID-easy makes your diagnostic journey simpler and less invasive.

The test involves a quick and painless vaginal swab.

If you are experiencing abnormal vaginal bleeding and are aged over 45 years old, you can ask your clinician for the WID-easy test.

WID-easy helps you make the most informed decision for the next steps in your care, and avoid unnecessary invasive procedures.

If you have abnormal bleeding, you are likely to be given an ultrasound to to check for signs of cancer, which if found, will trigger further testing. These tests often involve highly invasive procedures, such as hysteroscopy and curettage.

However, 9 in 10 patients referred for these procedures do not have womb cancer 1. The WID-easy test has been shown to be as accurate at detecting cancer as ultrasound, while reducing the number of false positive results (“false alarms”) by ~90% 1.

diagram comparing different methods of biopsy and womb cancer testing

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Key Benefits

Accurate

Rapid

Painless

Simple

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Literature and Resources

References

1. Evans, Iona et al. Performance of the WID-qEC test versus sonography to detect uterine cancers in women with abnormal uterine bleeding (EPI-SURE): a prospective, consecutive observational cohort study in the UK. The Lancet Oncology, Volume 24, Issue 12, 1375 – 1386.

2. Cancer research UK report, 2023

Technical Information

The accuracy of a test is expressed in sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value. The positive and negative predictive values are referred to as PPV and NPV.
Sensitivity indicates what proportion of diseased individuals will be correctly identified by the test. Specificity, on the other hand, indicates how many healthy individuals are correctly identified as healthy.
Since, in practice, we do not know before diagnosis whether a person has the disease or not, the predictive values are of particular interest to us: The positive predictive value (PPV) indicates how high the probability is that the patient has the disease if the test has a positive result – i.e., the test indicates cancer. The Negative Predictive Value (NPV), on the other hand, indicates the probability that a person with a negative test result (the test shows no evidence of cancer) is actually healthy. The WID®-easy test is characterized by extremely high values for sensitivity (90.9%), specificity (97.3%) and negative predictive value (99.7%).

The WID®-easy test is a so-called epigenetic DNA methylation test.

DNA” is the term used to describe the human genetic material that parents pass on to their children. It consists of various long filaments (“chromosomes”) that are tightly coiled in every cell of the body. DNA plays an important role in controlling the biological processes of the cell. Different regions of the DNA have different functions.

The so-called “DNA methylation” is a process that controls the activity of the different DNA regions. You can think of methylation as little marks on DNA.

This makes it possible for different processes to take place in different cells and for the cells to take on different tasks. DNA methylation is therefore not a genetic mutation, but merely a modification of the DNA.