Although patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer rarely live more than a year, the disease progresses slowly. Pancreatic cancer can take up to two decades to become symptomatic, and for some of that time it’s potentially curable with surgery. Unfortunately, patients generally aren’t diagnosed with asymptomatic disease—which has spurred a long, frustrating effort to identify blood markers that...

OBJECTIVES To describe the wide variation in presentation of cystadenomas of the liver and to delineate useful tests for diagnosis and effective surgical treatment. DESIGN A case series. SETTING A university-affiliated hospital. PATIENTS Four patients (3 women, 1 man) having cystadenoma of the liver, 2 of whom had associated mesenchymal stroma. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Serum and cyst fluid...

Leptomeningeal disease (LMD) can occur in a small percentage of patients with active metastatic cancer. However, we report a case of LMD occurring during disease remission in a patient with carcinoma of unknown primary with panreaticobiliary features. A 45-year-old woman was found with mediastinal and abdominal lymphadenopathy with lymph node biopsy consistent with adenocarcinoma, expressing im...

AIM To evaluate CEA and CA19-9 in a long-term follow-up after radical surgery for colorectal cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 1,090 patients were operated on for colorectal cancer, 716 patients underwent R0 resection, 631 patients were under further surveillance, relapse was diagnosed in 122 patients (20%), 74 patients were indicated for reoperation The resectability of the relapse was...

Mature cystic teratomas, or dermoid tumors, are the most common benign ovarian neoplasms in young women. Malignant transformation is rare, and occurs in less than 2% of the cases. The heterogeneous histological composition of these tumors may be responsible for the occasional elevation of various tumor markers, such as Ca19-9 and Ca125. We describe one case of mature cystic teratoma in a 50-yea...

Eleven patients with carcinoma of papilla of Vater accompanied by non-invasive adenomatous component (nac) had good prognosis after surgical resection. These carcinomas were associated with low serum CA19-9 levels seldom invaded or metastasized to the pancreas, duodenum, lymph node and vein. On the contrary, 12 patients whose carcinomas lacked in 'nac' had poor prognosis after resection. The 'n...

CA125 is a tumour marker test based on a monoclonal antibody against an antigen from an ovarian carcinoma cell line. Serum concentrations of CA125 were determined in 95 patients with pancreatic cancer and in 106 patients with benign pancreatic, biliary and hepatocellular diseases. The CA125 concentrations were compared with the CA19-9 and CEA levels. Almost half (45%) of the patients with pancr...

W e observed a 31-year-old male suffering from general malaise and body weight loss for almost 6 months. He came to our hospital for examination, and the reports showed recently diagnosed diabetes (fasting plasma glucose 309 mg/dl, HbA1C 14.9%) with elevated carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) 8.9 ng/ml (normal range 0 5 ng/ml) and carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9) 123 U/ml (normal range 0 37 U/ml)...

Some tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) are expressed on inflammatory cells. We previously detected carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA; CD66) in the rheumatoid (RA) synovium. The production of CEA, CA19-9, CA125, and CA15.3, may be increased in patients with RA, scleroderma, lupus, and Sjögren's syndrome (SS). Some of these TAAs contain sialylated carbohydrate motifs and they are involved in tumor-ass...