Clinical usefulness of tumor marker in head and neck cancer

Recently some investigators have reported that several tumor markers were useful to diagnosis cancer patients.In this paper, the changes of serum level of tumor markers (CEA, IAP and FER) were investigated in 60 patients with head and neck cancer and 43 patients with benign disease as a control.The following results were obtained:1) The positive rate in head and neck cancer was 48.3% for IAP, 28.3% for CEA and 13.3% for FER.2) The positive rate of tumor markers was extremely high in the cases of maxillary sinus (CEA: 63.3%, IAP: 75.0%), hard palate (IAP: 83.3%) and floor of the mouth (IAP: 66.7%).3) The serum level of IAP and CEA seemed to correlated with the clinical course of head and neck cancer patients.