CA 19-9 and CEA are the most commonly used biomarkers for diagnosis and management of patients with pancreatic cancer. Since the original compendium by Steinberg in 1990, numerous studies have reported the use of CA 19-9 and, to a lesser extent, CEA in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Here we update an evaluation of the accuracy of CA 19-9 and CEA, and, unlike previous reviews, focus on discrimination between malignant and benign disease instead of normal controls. In 57 studies involving 3,285 pancreatic carcinoma cases, the combined sensitivity of CA 19-9 was 78.2% and in 37 studies involving 1,882 cases with benign pancreatic disease the specificity of CA 19-9 was 82.8%. From the combined analysis of studies reporting CEA, the sensitivity was 44.2% (1,324 cases) and the specificity was 84.8% (656 cases). These measurements more appropriately reflect the expected biomarker accuracy in the differential diagnosis of patients with periampullary diseases. We also present a summary of the use of CA 19-9 as a prognostic tool and evaluate CA 19-9 diagnostic and prognostic utility in a 10-year, single institution experience.

Purpose: Timely and accurate diagnosis of pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PA) is hampered by the lack of effective circulating biomarkers. No single test has emerged that improves upon the commonly used biomarker, cancer antigen 19-9 (CA 19-9) to effectively discriminate PA from benign conditions. The goals of this study were to validate two acute phase proteins, haptoglobin and serum amyloid A (SAA), as biomarkers for PA and determine if the combination of haptoglobin, SAA and CA 19-9 would improve PA diagnosis over CA 19-9 alone. Methods Levels of haptoglobin, SAA and CA 19-9 were measured in pre-treatment sera from 75 PA patients, 32 patients with chronic pancreatitis, 42 patients with other benign pancreatic disease or biliary stricture and 150 healthy control subjects by ELISA or colorimetric binding assay. Relative levels of haptoglobin or SAA were compared between groups using ANOVA. The diagnostic accuracy of serum haptoglobin and SAA levels were investigated using receiver operating characteristics analysis. Using classification tree analysis, an algorithm was developed that used haptoglobin, SAA and CA 19-9 in a panel diagnostic screen. Results Both haptoglobin and SAA were significantly elevated in sera from PA patients compared to healthy control subjects (P < 0.0001) and patients with chronic pancreatitis (P = 0.01). Haptoglobin was significantly elevated in sera from PA patients relative to patients with other benign diseases (P = 0.0015), whereas SAA fell short of significance in the same comparison (P = 0.0508). Receiver operating characteristic analysis indicated that haptoglobin (AUC = 0.792) was a better diagnostic marker than SAA (AUC = 0.691) over multiple threshold cutoffs. Using specific cutoffs that minimized overall misclassification, haptoglobin yielded a sensitivity of 82.7 % and a specificity of 71.1% and SAA yielded a sensitivity of 34.7% and 90.2% specificity when discriminating PA cases from all non-PA controls. In the same sample set, CA 19-9 yielded a sensitivity of 77.3% and a specificity of 91.1%. Combining data from haptoglobin, SAA and CA 19-9 in a panel diagnostic screen improved overall accuracy over CA 19-9 alone yielding a sensitivity of 81.3% and a specificity of 95.5%. Conclusions These data demonstrate that haptoglobin and SAA are useful in discriminating PA from benign conditions as well as healthy controls when used in a panel diagnostic screen. This study supports the use of combined biomarkers for improved accuracy in the diagnosis of PA.