CA 125 behaviour by gender and potential prognostic role in early stage lung cancer

Summary CA 125 clinical importance might overcome the classic subset of ovarian cancer. Recent data demonstrated the utility of Ca125 as a prognostic factor in early-stage non-small cell lung cancer. Despite a huge amount of data in females there are no recent evaluation of CA 125 behaviour in healthy male population. Both gender healthy volunteers were investigated and routine single session CA 125 serum levels were collected. 50 post-menopausal women, 47 pre-menopausal women and 59 men were enrolled. A significant difference between median CA 125 levels of the three groups (respectively 11.7, 8.9 and 8.3; p=0.01) was found even though in two-by-two analysis only the difference between pre-menopausal women and men CA 125 values resulted statistically significant (p=0,007). Our data shows that CA 125 levels in healthy male population behave differently that in women and are similar to those of post-menopausal population.