Summary
What is the tumor marker? Generally, the change in the amount and quality of body liquid, excluding of patients with tumor, these signals can be used to detect the tumor in patients. Markers of tumor are mainly used in tumor detection, cancer screening and differential diagnosis of benign and malignant tumors, etc.
Body
The function of tumor markers
The tumor markers are used to detect the potential threat of the tumor. This is also a popular method in clinical diagnosis. We can get them from the blood, urine or tumor organization to reflect the condition of tumors. Compared with the imaging analysis, it is more accurate and called “invisible imaging”.
Generally, tumor markers are some substances existing on tumors. They can be classified into two categories---Tumor cell secretions and Tumor cell expression. The former is almost the glycoprotein, which can be detected in blood and other body liquid. According to this, we can find out that the glycosylation analysis of protein is really important for this aspect. At present, widely used markers are the CEA, Cyfra21-1, and NSE for the diagnosis of the lung cancer; CEA, CA199, CA244 and CA724 are used to digestion tumors and other markers used in all kinds of tumors. With the help of them, tumors can be diagnosed at the early stage, which can help a lot in the diagnosis of tumors. However, the bad news is that even though the tumor has been eliminated, they can reproduce and grow in your body. So the experienced doctors will use the imaging analysis for patients to evaluate the size of the tumor. So this kind of diagnosis is not much more reliable than the imaging analysis.
What we list here is some markers of all kinds of tumors.
The items of markers
AFP---AFP is widely used in many aspects, such as, the diagnosis of liver cancer, endoderm carcinoma, teratoma, testicular cancer, ovarian cancer and stomach cancer.
CEA---Elevated CEA's can be a signal of the colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer lung cancer and other cancers. Smokers also have the high level of the CEA. And other kinds of symptoms can be detected with the level of CEA.
CA15-3---Breast cancer can be analyzed with the CA15-3.
CA19-9---This is mainly used in detecting pancreatic cancer, gallbladder cancer and bile duct cancer ampulla.
CA72-4 and PSA
These are the brief introduction on tumor markers. You also can learn more information about the glycosylation analysis of protein by following the website there.