Serial Patterns of Ovarian Cancer Biomarkers in a Prediagnosis Longitudinal Dataset

open access (long/technical article)

  The area under the ROC curve for the panel of three biomarkers (CA125, HE4, and glycodelin) was higher than for CA125 alone for all analysed time groups, indicating that these markers can improve on sensitivity of CA125 alone for ovarian cancer detection.

We show that, in addition to HE4 (which has been shown to be the second best performing marker after CA125 in the context of screening), glycodelin is a novel and useful adjunct to CA125 for early detection of ovarian cancer. Glycodelin has only been previously tested in the diagnosed case control setting [11, 21], although with promising results. This work also supports previous studies showing the potential of HE4 [10–14, 16, 19], whilst suggesting that mesothelin, MMP7, and CYFRA 21-1 are not useful markers for the early detection of ovarian cancer. The next step in this work would be to validate these findings in a larger independent set and to test the potential of these candidates in multimarker longitudinal algorithms.