CEA WAY Down.....

[Phil in Az]

It started out at 3.1, then 3 months later 1.7, now 6 months efter dx i'm at 0.5! I know anything can change, butthis sure makes me feel good about my health.

-phil

[Guest]

Hi Phil-

Mine went from 0.9-1.4, an increase of 0.5. What do you make of that? I've always had diarrhea prior to surgery for 8 months and for 1.5 years since, but now for the last 3 weeks, I have bloating and less frequent bowel movements, and gained 7 lbs quickly?! I'm paranoid of a recurrence...

Congratulations on your decrease. That is great! You deserve it!

Star

[John]

Phil - congratulations. My CEA was 5.9 after surgery for removal of my tumor and has slowly declined down to 2. I had a bad reaction to one of my chemo treatments or a virial infection on top of it. It caused the doctors to run a lot of tests including a pet scan. The pet scan shocked us since it showed that my cancer had actually spread. I was hesitant to submit this comment because in my case the CEA was NOT a good indicator. So I wanted to say that it might be an idea to talk to your oncologist about a situation like this. We were feeling very positive because of the CEA scores.

John

[Magnolia]

My CEA was 0.7 before surgery. It won't be too useful as a marker in the future because it never did elevate even when there was tumor there. There's no detectable tumor now, but should it recur, I doubt we'd see any increase in CEA. We'll just have to watch the scans.

CEA is a useful tool, but it's not a perfect one. A decrease is USUALLY a very good sign, though.