Tumour markers in urology

The same applies essentially also for the bladder carcinomas: There is no reliable marker for these cancers which would be useful for clinical purposes. TPA has proven to be too non-specific in malignoma-detection and therefore hardly facilitates clinical decision-making in individual cases. The CEA is not sensitive enough to be recommendable for routine application. However, in advanced stages a CEA examination may be useful if applied within the scope of therapeutic efforts made to evaluate efficacy. In cases of carcinomas of the prostate the sour prostate-specific phosphatase (SPP) and, more recently, especially the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) have proven in follow-up and therapy monitoring, whereby the PSA is superior to the SPP. Nevertheless, both these markers should be employed in therapy monitoring because differences in behaviour will be observed when the desired treatment effect is only achieved in one of the two markers producing tumour cell clonuses. Both markers, but especially the PSA, are quite reliably in agreement with the result of the introduced chemo-/hormone therapy, whereby an increase may be a sure indicator of relapse several months previous to clinical symptoms, imaging procedures, so-called routine laboratory results and subjective complaints. However, none of the 2 markers is appropriate for the purposes of screening or early diagnosis of carcinomas of the prostate. (orig.)