Urinary He4 for Diagnosis of Ovarian Cancer: A Case-Control Study

Human epidydimis secretory protein 4 is an 11kDa protein, which is localized on chromosome 20q12 (Schummer et al., 1999). For the first it was identified in epidydimis epithelium and its function was initially associated with the maturation of sperm involved in protease inhibition (Kirchhoff et al., 1998). Human epidydimis secretory proteins in the cell can be found in the cytoplasm perinucleary as endoplasmatic network structure. There is glycosylation and release of the HE4 in extracellular environment from ovarian cancer cells (Drapkin et al., 2005). Ovarian cancer associated antigen CA125 is increased in 40-50% of early stage ovarian cancer patients (Rosen et al., 2005), but there have been documented that human epidydimis secretory protein 4 is increased in 82.7-90.0% cases of early stage ovarian cancers (Havrilesky et al., 2008), moreover, HE4 is