SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) -- A new test using 186 genes accurately predicted the risk of recurrence of breast cancer and other types of the disease, U.S. researchers reported.

The findings could allow patients whose cancer is unlikely to return to avoid the ordeal of aggressive surgery, according to researchers at the University of Michigan and Stanford University.

Working with breast cancer stem cells, scientists devised a 186-gene "invasiveness" gene signature to evaluate patient survival rates.

Researchers placed patients with high-risk early breast cancer into one of two categories -- good prognosis or poor prognosis -- based on the gene test.

The 10-year survival rate for patients with a good prognosis was 81 percent. The 10-year survival rate for patients determined by the test to have a poor prognosis was 57 percent, according to the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The gene test was able to predict similar outcomes in prostate and lung cancer as well as medulloblastoma, the most common form of childhood brain cancer, according to the study.

"These data suggest that there are some fundamental properties of the malignancy that are shared between many types of tumors," said doctor Michael Clarke, a cancer biology professor at Stanford University, who led the study.

The gene test's ability to predict cancer resilience was more accurate when combined with another previously identified group of genes, Clarke said.

"These are exciting results," wrote doctor Joan Massague, chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, in an accompanying editorial.