[Clinical usefulness of tumor markers for the diagnosis of ovarian cancer].

The most useful diagnostic methods for ovarian cancer at present are diagnostic imaging and measurement of tumor markers. Although many tumor markers have been measured to detect patients with ovarian cancer, the values of diagnostic efficiency are not so high when a single tumor marker is assessed. Therefore, the use of a combination of tumor markers might be expected to yield a higher value. In this study, tumor markers were measured to select an ovarian cancer group from a group in which ovarian tumor was palpable by the pelvic examination. We selected CA 602 from core-protein related markers, CA 54/61 from sugar chain core-related markers, and galactosyltransferase associated with tumor (GAT) for their combined use from among eleven markers examined. As a result, the combined use of each two markers or of all three markers appeared to be beneficial to discriminate ovarian cancers from benign ovarian tumors. The combination of all three markers gave a somewhat higher positive rate and diagnostic efficiency value than that of the two markers. The role of tumor markers in the future screening of ovarian cancer was also discussed in this paper.