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CA 19-9 Levels - What is High Enough to Cause Concern for Prognosis?
Pancreatic Cancer | Last Active: 6 hours ago | Replies (17)Comment receiving replies
Hello,
WOW my husband has the very same circumstances he did 3 cycles (6 treatments) of the same medications.... Unfortunately for my husband... before the surgeon would do the Whipple surgery, they wanted to make sure he didn't have cancer anywhere else.....so they went in laparoscopically and saw a few suspicious spots, biopsied them, and unfortunately they came back with cancer cells.... so no surgery..... Knowing this, they changed is chemo meds and regimen... however by doing this... his CA19-9 numbers doubled (they were going down with the previous chemo regimen) we are VERY upset... I am hoping that someone on here can give me advice.... we would definitely like a 2nd opinion.... HELP!
Replies to "Hello, WOW my husband has the very same circumstances he did 3 cycles (6 treatments) of..."
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@mjh1967 , which chemo was your husband on before surgery and what did they switch it to after?
It might be too soon to tell if the change was a bad thing or not. I'm guessing he was off chemo at least 4 weeks prior to the surgery attempt; there may have been some delayed reaction causing the CA19-9 increase simply due to the time off chemo. Mine has done that in two instances.
It's also possible inflammation after the operation caused a temporary increase.
There are also documented cases where initiation of chemo leads to a short-/medium-term increase in CA19-9 levels.
At this point, I would insist on regular, frequent (biweekly) monitoring of CA19-9 levels so you can see a fine-grained trend (not just huge jumps from samples taken 4-6 weeks apart). I would also ask the surgeon if they saved enough of the biopsy tissue to create a Signatera test that can be used as a complement to imaging and CA19-9.