← Return to Realistic CEA Perspective Needed
DiscussionRealistic CEA Perspective Needed
Colorectal Cancer | Last Active: Aug 6, 2018 | Replies (17)Comment receiving replies
Replies to "Hello @maestro, Welcome to Connect. As @brenz shared (thank you!), the clinical value of CEA in..."
Thank you so much for the information and links. I read through them this morning over coffee. A ton of good info there. Understanding that the CEA is not used alone to determine recurrence, and especially not useful for initial diagnosis, I have thoughts on the raw data of the study.
The final chart lists CEA testing results for every patient in the study. In addition, it indicates patients with recurrence. When I sort by recurrence, I find CEA tests of >14 among those with recurrence, whereas when I look at patients that had no recurrence, the highest value that I found was 7.
Among the patients with recurrences, there are plenty of individuals with normal CEA levels . I believe this lends itself to the statement that CEA levels alone cannot detect, since patients deal with recurrence at normal CEA levels, and often don't have recurrence with elevated CEA. However, since the data on patients that did not have a recurrence includes no CEA levels above 7, it seems that numbers >10 lead to recurrence or related preventative measures (chemo, etc.).
Tricky stuff to parse through, but extremely interesting.
I can't say thank you enough to all who read and respond. Opinions, experiences, and support are so critical to navigating this landscape.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!