Abstract
BACKGROUND: Due to it's concealment and no obvious symptoms, lung squamous carcimoma often has advanced disease when diagnosed. The aims of this study were to describe the characteristics of the disease, to evaluate the clinical importance of detection of multiple tumor markers in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. METHODS: The characteristics of all patients with advanced squamous cell lung cancer treated in Beijing Cancer Hospital of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences during Jan. 2011 to Dec. 2015 were identified by cases reviewing and data extracting. The characteristics, detection levels and sensitivity of multiple tumor makers among patients were described. RESULTS: The 260 patients were treated with mean age of (59.4±9.2) years, 85.8% (n=223) of them were male, 14.2% (n=37) of them were female. 78.1% (n=203) of all were smokers and 3.1% (n=8) of patients had family history of tumor. The positive rate of cytokerantin 19 fragment (CYFRA21-1) was 71.2%, which was the highest among five tumor markers. The five tumor markers median level had no statistical significance between different tumor (T) stages and node (N) stages (all P>0.05), only the positive rate of SCC had statistical significance between different T stages (P=0.035). The combination measurement of CYFRA21-1+carcinogen-embryonic antigen (CEA), CYFRA21-1+CEA+cancer antigen (CA125), CA125+CYFRA21-1+CEA+neuron specific enolase (NSE), and CA125+CYFRA21-1+NSE+CEA+squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCC) were better and had higher clinical values, the positive rates were 82.7%, 84.6%, 85.0% and 86.2%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The positive rate of CYFRA21-1 was the highest and the sensitivity of single test of five tumor markers was low, the combination of multiple tumor markers increased the sensitivity of diagnosis of SQCLC, the combination of CA125, CYFRA21-1 and CEA was the best choice.