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CA 19-9 Levels - What is High Enough to Cause Concern for Prognosis?
Pancreatic Cancer | Last Active: Mar 1 9:42am | Replies (25)Comment receiving replies
@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.
Replies to "@mjh1967 , which chemo was your husband on before surgery and what did they switch it..."
Hello,
I think his first set was Folfurinox (spelling?) and a few others... Fu-5, Fulphila injection... something like that... they were giving those to "treat/cure" just the tumor.... but when they found out that it metastasized to diaphragm and very lower tip of liver..... they changed it to Gemabraxen... (its 2 different ones). he's only had 4 doses of that one... however there was 3 weeks that he had no chemo (maybe thats why the CA19-9 numbers went up, but we were very discouraged.... and quite frankly, we are scared.... he goes to chemo every 2 weeks...
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I don’t know how high your husbands CA19-9 went but I have just seen the effect of sepsis (inflammation) on mine - it went way high but has now come down although it’s taken several weeks for this to happen (no evidence of cancer recurrence during thus time).