WITHDRAWN: Diagnostic performance of carbohydrate antigen 72-4 for gastrointestinal malignancy screening in Chinese patients: a prospective study

Abstract

Background: Over the past decades, carbohydrate antigen 72-4 (CA72-4) was considered as a tumor marker that was elevated in normal people and patients with malignancies, including gastrointestinal malignancies, ovarian malignancies, endometrium malignancies, lung malignancies and so on. Besides, researches showed that elevated serum CA72-4 might predict digestive tumors, especially gastric tumors, although there was still neither sensitive nor specific tumor biomarker for gastric cancer.Aim: This study was aimed to evaluatethe diagnostic accuracy of CA72-4 in predicting malignancies, especially the gastric cancer.Result: The positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), positive likelihood ratio (PLR) and negative likelihood ratio (NLR) of CA72-4 for diagnosing gastric cancer were 69.7%, 95.9%, 1.70, and 0.97, respectively. In the Receiver Operating Characteristic analysis (ROC),the area under the curvewas 0.62 for discriminating patients with gastric cancer from those without.Conclusions: It is of little significance to perform CA72-4 testalone for predicting malignances, especially gastric cancer, in digestive disease patients.Methods: Four hundred and three patients underwent CA72-4 test after admission to the Department of Gastroenterology in Changhai Hospital, the Second Military Medical University, from June 1, 2015 to October 31, 2015. Data of age, sex, main symptoms and final diagnosis were summarized.