CEA blood test

[tammy1208]

My brother has lung cancer, he has been fighting this battle for 6 years, we have had our up and downs, he has scans every 3 mos and just got results, the scans are pretty much what we expected, but his CEA level in his blood test has an elevated reading, what I need help with is what is concidered "normal" level, what is a high level reading, etc...

My brother is 49 and unfortunatly does not live close by, so I am not able to go to the doctors with him, he had pet scans done yesterday, hopefully getting results today on that.  My mother passed away almost 2 years ago from Breast Cancer so this has hit out family very hard... I believe my brothers CEA reading was an 8.. what does this mean????

Any information would be helpful,

Thanks
Tammy

[taramacnj]

Hi heinrik my mom is 81 years old twenty years ago she underwent colon resection for CRC with preoperative radiation with adjuvant chemotherapy 5FU and leukovorin with post op six month chemo with temp colostomy and with reversal after six months NED since.  I took her to ER for abdominal problems where they did a CT Scan of abdomen with was normal but caught a left lower lobe nodule on scan.   I took her to oncologist she has be seeing because she was diagnosed three months ago with chronic lymphatic leukemia which is stable.  He drew a CEA and came back at 54!!  Now we are going for chest ct scan!  Any thoughts ???

Thanks very concerned daughter

[tammy1208]

Thank you for your information.  I think my brother has an angel on his shoulder.  I know he is very luck to have survived this long and has a good quality of life.  Nothing stops him, he works 60 hours a week, has a very active family life with 2 kids 13 and 14 and the most amazing wife that is with him every step fighting as hard as he does.  My brother was diagnosed with caner, taken in for surgury right away, have a large portion of his lung removed and started chemo and radiation.  He is a patient at Cedat Sini in Los Angeles.  He has had several rounds of chemo, several rounds of radiation and finally was on a clinical trial.  Eventually he was not able to be in the clinical trail since him tumor had grown.  He goes every 3 mos for scans and usually there has been no change. This last time there was a little growth in some and no growth in others.  They had said his CEA level was elevated.  He had some other stuff going on (he is not a smoker, gave that up 20 years ago) so when he got his scan results on Friday they re-did the blood work.  He got results back on Monday his reading was an 8 and he went in for PET scans on TUesday, we are waiting for those results now.  I have never had him talk about CEA or blood test, nor do I remember that with my mother and her breast cancer.  I did not know what that ment.  I have done alot of research and some of it is really scary!  my problem is that I dont know if that is a high reading or not...

I am so scared and worried... I have a trip planned for May out ot LA (it will be his 50th birthday) and I am scared he wont be here or so sick.  I stay positive, he has beaten all the odds so far... but what do you think all this may mean..

Any input you have would be wonderful.

Thanks
Tammy

[HeinrikMD]

Hi,

Did your brother undergo any operation to remove all the cancer in the past? If he never had any such treatment in the past, would you know if the surgery was deemed futile since the disease was at a stage where it wasn't possible?

The reason I'm asking the above is that at the current time it is not standard to monitor the CEA for lung cancer. For Colon Cancer, the CEA can be used for certain patients to monitor disease recurrence (this is most useful for the patients who had surgery for the colonic cancer).

If your brother started off with stage 3 or 4 disease, it is pretty rare for these groups to survive 6 years, and hence his doctor may be using whatever test in the hope it would make a difference in guiding subsequent treatment options. In general, the CEA may indicate disease returning, its amount does not necessarily correlate with disease burden (meaning the higher the value, the higher number of cancer cells). However, it is also known that smokers may have an elevated CEA, and a value of 8 (smokers generally have values up to 5) is not that high to isolate whether such a level is predictive of presence of disease and not merely the extremes of normal variation. Your doctor will likely be able to answer you better if there was a series of determinations of the CEA - however, with such small values, I would doubt he would be very confident with predicting relapse using only this blood test. Other tests would likely be imaging tools to look for certain areas where lung cancer is known to progress.

Stay positive.