Postby hannahw » Mon Mar 26, 2012 1:20 pm
I wouldn't worry until the doc tells you there's something to worry about. Is it possible something is afoot? Anything is possible. But most likely, it's nothing. Cancer takes so much of our control away from us so I think it's really normal to want to be super-vigiliant, to make sure that we're at the ready for any little blip so that we can attack aggressively against any cancer rather than feeling like we're stuck being defensive/reactive. The problem with this is that you can end up spending your life waiting for the other shoe to fall insteading of enjoying your life in the moment. In most cases, whatever the CEA might tell you probably isn't going to change the outcome of whatever treatment follows.
Docs look at CEA for trends over time. Two or three CEA values doesn't establish much of a trend. A lot of docs describe CEA values as "pass/fail." Anything under about 6 is considered a pass. So doubling from under 1 to slightly over 1 is not cause for alarm. The fact that your wife's CEA was so low at diagnosis suggests that CEA is not a good marker for her. It is not, in fact, a good marker for most people. My Dad, for example, has had some raging colon cancer and a CEA that has never been above 2.0, regardless of what's going on. My Dad's onc still draws the CEA from time to time because it change from being no indictator to being a good indicator, but the onc has always told us that CEA is just a small part of a big, complicated picture so you don't want to tie your worries to it. More often than not it's going to cause you unwarranted stress.
I'm not sure every doctor explains this, but CEA is just a protein that all humans generate to some degree, even healthy bodies that are cancer free. The reason it is sometimes used as a marker for colon cancer is because GI tumors are more likely to express abnormal amoutns of CEA, but "more likely" doesn't even mean it's true for the majority of CRC patients. It's actually lass than half of all CRC patients who have CEA markers that are indicative of anything. And even for those people, if the CEA goes up, it tends to go up before the scans show anything and most docs what treat what can't even be seen so the rise in CEA tends to raise the level survellience (like maybe you get a scan more frequently than you would otherwise).
Additionally, it's not a static value so if you draw blood for CEA in the morning and then again in the even, you'll most likely get two different numbers. So a change in your wife's CEA that is as small as the one you're describing could just be the ebb and flow of the body, a reflection of a working system at work.
Daughter of Dad with Stage IV CC