How We Monitor Progress: Tumor Markers Part 2

Transcript

Hi, I’m Dr. Branyon with New Hope Unlimited. I want to continue talking about tumor markers. And yes if you just join in this for the first time, we are traveling to Arizona to meet the new patients tomorrow.

So I’m using my time to – hopefully, do a little work and enjoy what I’m doing by talking and teaching. Anyway, let’s get back to the tumor markers, every type of cancer has its own marker, and remember tumor markers raise blood levels and the bloodstream that circulate so when you draw blood or doctor draws blood, looking for tumor markers, that is how it’s found, by those circulating tumor cells.

And as we talked in the other video, you can find those in blood, urine, tumor itself and fecal matter. But in this video, I wanna talk about which tumor markers usually goes with which cancer. You can look on the internet at www.oncolink.org, that’s spelled o-n-c-o-l-i-n-k (dot) o-r-g. This will help you to understand more than what I’ve probably told you about tumor markers.

But, let’s say we have a patient with lung cancer or brain cancer, let me just give you the markers, a CEA, a capital C, a capital E and a capital A. Now that stands for a big long word, so I’m just gonna give you CEA, you can look up a lot of information because that’s basically what everyone, every doctor, every lab uses, it’s the CEA. That usually is the marker for the brain, lung, and colon. Now PSA is used for prostate, the CA-125 is usually used for ovarian cancer. Colon, colorectal can be  CEA or CA 19-9. Now pancreas, if we’re looking at markers on pancreas, that can be and usually is a CA 19-9. And AFP is for germ cell cancers of the ovaries and testes. Testicular cancer, they usually check the AFP. People who have multiple myeloma, that’s usually the Bence Jones proteins. Now breast is usually CA 15-3 or a CA 27-29.

There’s many more but I don’t wanna bore you with that because whoever you are, if you’ve got cancer, you’ve got your own cancer and your own cancer takes certain tumor marker.

Not all tumor markers are used for the same cancers, so that’s important.

If your doctor is not doing tumor markers, I would ask the reason why, and it may be that it’s your insurance, or it may be that they are, you know in the United States there is rules and regulations now and doctors do seem to get afraid to go outside the box and I can’t blame them because they can lose their license, and there’s good doctors, they just have to work under certain circumstances sometimes.

But if you’re not getting a tumor marker, I would ask for one, just to get a baseline, because a baseline would tell you where you’re at the moment. And then later on, you can get another one to see where you’re at, I think it’s important. I hope this has helped a little bit on the tumor markers, if not we can go into more details, just let me know what you need. But check out the oncolink.org and there’s other websites that can help you too. Thanks for joining me.