Assessment of Asymptomatically Increased CA 19-9 / 대한췌담도학회지

ABSTRACT

Health care screening is becoming more popular in Korea as more people are interested in well-being and health. However, there are controversies regarding usefulness of screening. Tumor markers are frequently measured in the health care screening. As a result, many patients end up visiting physicians because of incidentally found increased levels of tumor markers. Carbohydrate antigen (CA) 19-9 is the single most useful tumor marker for pancreatic cancer. Although CA 19-9 is useful for predicting prognosis and evaluating treatment response for pancreatic cancer, CA 19-9 is less useful for screening of pancreatic cancer because of low incidence of pancreatic cancer.