Usefulness of Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA) in Evaluating Response to Chemotherapy in Patients with Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Abstract

Non-small cell lung cancer represents nearly 80% of all lung cancer patients and it depends only on radiological studies for evaluation of response to treatment. Unfortunately, not all cases with lung cancer have measurable diseases which make assessment of response more difficult.

In our study, we prospectively conducted 30 patients with CEA above 10ng/ml to evaluate changes in CEA and correlated it with radiological response in patients treated with platinum-based chemotherapy. In our study, median age of patients was 62 years range 49-70 and male to female ratio (5.3:4.7) 37% known to be smokers and the majority of our patients had ECOG performance ≤2 and most of our patients presented by stage ІV and adenocarcinoma histological subtype. In our study we evaluated response by CTs according to RECIST criteria and considered patients with clinical response (PR and SD) as responders and patients with PD as non-responders. The basal level of serum CEA was significantly associated with age and smoking. Conversely, no association was observed between pretreatment serum CEA and gender, stage, site of metastases or pleural effusion.