Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and tissue polypeptide antigen (TPA) for prognosis and monitoring of patients with lung canger

Lung cancer is an aggressive type of tumor in which, despite removal of most of the tumor by surgery or the reduction of carcinoma to low levels by chemotherapy or radiotherapy (especially small cell), there is still a high rate of recurrence of progressive disease within 12 years. Therefore, it is relatively easy to design trials to evaluate the importance of markers for prognosis, as an aid in determining therapy, or for following patients for early detection of recurrent disease. In this type of tumor a wide variety of hormonal and non hormonal markers has been studied. Among the non hormonal ones the tumor associated antigens (TAA) have been demonstrated to be useful for praticai clinical purposes; especially CEA in conjunction with TPA, although these tests are not highly tumor specific, was found to be quite useful in the management of lung cancer (3, 6) and was observed to give higher reliability than other tumor tests used together (7). The objective in the planning of this study was to clarify the interpretation and application of these tests to monitoring of the patients undergoing chemotherapy.