Cancer screening through a multi-analyte serum biomarker panel during health check-up examinations: Results from a 12-year experience.

BACKGROUND

The use of blood-based tumor biomarkers for screening malignancies at early stages has significant advantages, including being convenient, automated, quantitative, objective, and relatively inexpensive compared with histology, endoscopy, and imaging.

METHODS

We describe our 12-year experience on the diagnostic usefulness of a biomarker panel consisting of eight molecules (i.e., α-fetoprotein, carcinoembryonic antigen, prostate-specific antigen, CA 19-9, CA125, CA 15-3, squamous cell specific antigen, and cytokeratin 19 fragment) for cancer screening in Taiwanese subjects who underwent a health check-up examination at their own expenses.

RESULTS

The sensitivity of the panel for the detection of specific cancers was higher than that of isolated cancer-specific markers. Specifically, the sensitivity of the panel for identifying the four most commonly diagnosed malignancies (i.e., liver cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer) was 90.9%, 75.0%, 100%, and 76.9%, respectively. The ability of the panel to detect early-stage (stage 1) hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or prostate cancer was similar to that observed for advanced malignancies.

CONCLUSIONS

The multi-analyte biomarker panel is clinically useful during health check-up examinations for the screening of different tumors (especially for the early detection of HCC and prostate malignancies).