Clinical Significance and Prognostic Value of CA72-4 Compared with CEA and CA19-9 in Patients with Gastric Cancer

Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and CA 19-9 are both widely used in the follow up of patients with gastrointestinal cancer. More recently another tumor marker, named CA 72-4 has been identified and characterized using two different monoclonal antibodies B72.3 and CC49. Several reports evaluated CA 72-4 as a serum tumor marker for gastric cancer and compared its clinical utility with that of CEA or CA 19-9; few reports concerned its prognostic value. In the present study, CA 72-4 is evaluated and compared with CEA and CA 19-9 in various populations of patients with gastric cancer and benign disease; for 52 patients with gastric adenocarcinoma and 57 patients without neoplastic disease CEA, CA 19-9 and CA 72-4 were evaluated before treatment. Sensitivity of the tumor markers CA 72-4, CA 19-9 and CEA at the recommended cut-off level in all 52 patients were 58%, 50% the sensitivity increased to 75%. of these markers, for non metastatic patients, multivariate analyses indicated that none of the markers were significant, when adjusted for gender and age (which were indicators of poor prognosis); patients with abnormal values of CA72-4 tended to have shorter survival than patients with normal values (p < 0.07). In the metastatic population, only high values of CA19-9 (p < 0.02) and gender (women) (p < 0.03) were indicators of poor prognosis in univariate analysis; multivariate analysis revealed that both CA72-4 (p = 0.034) and CA19-9 p = 0.009), adjusted for gender were independent prognostic factors. However, CA72-4 lost significance (p = 0.41) when adjusted for CA19-9 and gender, indicating that CA19-9 provides more prognostic information than CA72-4