A new blood test correctly detected ovarian cancer in its early stages with 95 percent accuracy. While the new test offers hope to women who have the usually undetectable and deadly form of cancer, researchers say the test is not quite accurate enough to make it available to the general public.

The simple blood test measured four proteins in a woman's blood, leptin, osteopontin, prolalctin and insulin-like growth factor-II. The test is 95 percent accurate according to researchers as compared to the present test which is only accurate 10 percent of the time.

'This test is able to differentiate healthy individuals from ovarian cancer patients with an overall sensitivity/specificity of about 95 percent,' the researchers said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There would still be too many false positives and negatives to make the test available as a screening tool for the general public. Still, researchers were hopeful that the test could be used for women with a family history of cancer in their family or are at a higher risk for ovarian cancer.

'This test should improve our ability to accurately detect premalignant change or early stage ovarian cancer in asymptomatic women at increased risk for the development of ovarian cancer,' they wrote.

Because ovarian cancer is so difficult to detect in its early stages, it is a particularly deadly form of cancer. Vague symptoms like bloating and excess bleeding are the only early indicators. By the time the cancer is diagnosed, it has usually spread. As a result, 16,000 of the women diagnosed with ovarian cancer will die from it out of the roughly 22,000 who are diagnosed each year.

While this test is not accurate enough to be used by the general public, it is a big step forward towards the early detection of a deadly form of cancer that will give hope to thousands of women in the future.