Clinical Significance of CEA and CA19-9 in Postoperative Follow-up of Colorectal Cancer

Background We evaluated the efficiency of CEA and CA19-9 as tools for diagnosing recurrence in the postoperative surveillance of colorectal cancer. Materials and Methods A total of 227 patients who underwent curative resection for colorectal cancer between 1999 and 2003 at our hospital received complete follow-up according to the schedule determined prospectively. Using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, performance of postoperative values of CEA or CA19-9 for detecting recurrence was assessed. Results The sensitivity (1.000) and specificity (0.978) of the postoperative values of CEA in the high preoperative CEA group were very high. Even in the normal preoperative CEA group, the area under the curve (AUC) of the ROC curve of CEA (0.740, 95% confidence interval [95% CI], 0.628–0.852) was significantly larger than 0.5 ( P