Will I get cancer if CA125 is elevated?

Will I get cancer if CA125 is elevated?  Elevated CA125 does not mean ovarian cancer. CA125-Tn can further help determine the possibility of ovarian cancer.

Nowadays, whether it is a gynecological physical examination or a B-ultrasound finding a mass in the pelvic cavity, doctors will prescribe tumor marker tests. The most common one is CA125.

Outpatient clinics often encounter such scenes. Patients hurried into the clinic and asked with the medical examination report: “Doctor, my physical examination found that CA125 was elevated. There were more than 60. The medical examination center notified me to go to the hospital for further examination. Ovarian cancer?”

Actually otherwise, I will introduce the ins and outs of CA125 today.

1 What is CA125?

Cancer Antigen 125 (CA125) was first discovered by Professor R. Bast in 1981. All tissues (except ovarian surface epithelium) developed from the body cavity epithelium during embryonic stage basically produce a small amount of CA125. Therefore, in healthy people, blood CA125 is maintained at a low level, which plays a role of lubrication, resistance to foreign bodies and anti-infection. When ovarian or fallopian tube cancer occurs, the tumor cells proliferate in large quantities and synthesize and secrete a large amount of CA125, and the blood CA125 will appear at a higher level.

2 What are the diseases that cause CA125 to increase?

In fact, the disease that causes elevated serum CA125 is not just ovarian cancer. In obstetrics and gynecology, common female menstrual period, pregnancy status, or benign diseases such as endometriosis and pelvic inflammatory disease may cause the increase of CA125 index. In addition, benign diseases such as digestive system liver cirrhosis, chronic active hepatitis, acute heart failure, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer and other system cancers can also lead to increased serum CA125 levels. Researchers have analyzed 191 female patients with abnormally elevated serum CA125 levels in the medical center and found that 40% of the patients were patients with benign diseases, 26% were patients with non-ovarian malignancies, and the other 14% were healthy women or unknown causes CA125 is elevated, while ovarian cancer patients account for only 20%.

In other words, not all patients with ovarian cancer have an elevated CA125, nor can an elevated CA125 be used to diagnose ovarian cancer. It is necessary to point out that gynecological endometriosis is a gynecological benign disease that mainly causes elevated serum CA125 levels in addition to pelvic inflammatory disease. However, in general, the increase in serum CA125 level of patients with endometriosis is positively correlated with the stage, and most of them are less than 100U/ml.

3 What is the difference between CA125 in patients with ovarian cancer and benign diseases?

We have used scientific methods to study the special features of ovarian cancer CA125 molecules, that is, through the analysis of molecular structure, we can judge the quality of CA125, so as to improve the diagnostic specificity of CA125 and improve the accuracy of preoperative diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

CA125 molecule is mainly composed of 4 parts, C-terminal intracellular region, transmembrane region, extracellular tandem repeat sequence and N-terminal glycosylation sequence mucin. In short, the CA125 molecule consists of a protein backbone and sugar chains. For example, everyone has seen the court hats of officials of the Qing Dynasty in the film and television series. It has a feathered tail and the scientific name is “Ling Yu”. The protein backbone of the CA125 molecule is equivalent to the main body of the cap, and the sugar chain is like that feather. Lingyu is an important symbol that distinguishes the rank of officials and is close to the emperor. The sugar chain is also of great significance to the function of CA125.

A large number of studies have proved that compared with benign diseases, the sugar chains carried on the protein are different for malignant tumors. Therefore, we compared CA125 derived from ovarian cancer and CA125 derived from benign diseases and found that CA125 derived from ovarian cancer carries more Tn antigen (an O sugar chain). Accordingly, we developed the CA125-Tn detection kit. Preliminary results show that if CA125-Tn is also increased in patients with CA125 abnormalities, the possibility of her suffering from ovarian cancer is further increased.

All in all, elevated CA125 does not equal ovarian cancer. CA125-Tn can further help determine the possibility of ovarian cancer. We will continue to look for and develop various glycosyl subtypes of CA125 to continuously improve the accuracy of ovarian cancer diagnosis.

(source:internet, reference only)

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