Abstract
Biochemical changes in colorectal cancer vary considerably according to the stage, the disease, and the tumour burden. The search for tumour markers in this disease has been of considerable interest since the early descriptions of carcinoembryonic antigen by Gold and Freedman (1965) and the realisation that CEA levels in the plasma could be used to monitor the evolution of certain forms of gastrointestinal cancer (Hansen et al. 1974; Moore et al. 1971; MacKay et al. 1974). Since this pioneer work, CEA has been the subject of many reviews. One of the more recent, by Ladenson and McDonald (1980), provides a guide to the main literature on this topic. To rehearse this information yet again is probably unhelpful. Instead we have chosen to report and discuss the experience gained in Leeds in the monitoring of large-bowel cancer from 1974 to 1981 and try to identify some of the reasons why it is still difficult to make many definitive statements about biochemical monitoring and the advantages and limitations of the systems currently available.
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© 1982 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Cooper, E.H., O’Quigley, J. (1982). Biochemical Markers. In: Duncan, W. (eds) Colorectal Cancer. Recent Results in Cancer Research, vol 83. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-81802-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-81802-8_7
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