Talk:Tumor marker

A fact from Tumor marker appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 10 February 2005. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that tumor markers are chemical substances found in blood that arise from the presence of cancerous tissues?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2005/February.

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Cancer- vs tissue-specific[edit]

This theme doesn't work very well, or at least is not well explained. Consider AFP, which seems to be rather intermediate between the two classes. In babies AFP is normally elevated but in adults elevated AFP is a fairly good sign of something wrong. Either cancer or liver disease. I propose to rewrite this article to roughly "grade" each tumor marker by how sensitive and specific it is. Some are very nonspecific, so can be used for screening but not diagnosis. Some may be specific enough to be used for diagnosis. --Una Smith 12:32, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the current classifications isn't that good. I'm changing it to "Tissue specific tumor markers" and "Other tumor markers" until a better solution is found. Mikael Häggström (talk) 11:24, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I've decided to make a table of them, so that they can be classified by various modalities at the same time. Mikael Häggström (talk) 11:39, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Add GGT?[edit]

Add Gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) per Glow green for go: scientists develop cancer marker 28/11/11 12:13 CET by University of Tokyo's Yasuteru Urano? 99.181.131.33 (talk) 00:20, 30 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Suggested merge with cancer biomarkers[edit]

- Not sure about this - what would we call it? cancer and tumor biomarkers? Some tumors are benign, and some cancers like leukemia are not tumors. - Rod57 (talk) 18:01, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I support this merger. Normally the distinction is that proteins, conjugated proteins and carbohydrates determined by immunoassay or similar are tumor markers, genes characterized by sequencing tools are biomarkers. Here it is not so, I support hte merger of the two articles, they nor overlap severely.Lave (talk) 21:33, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Relation to tumor antigen[edit]

Intro says "Most tumor markers are tumor antigens, but not all tumor antigens can be used as tumor markers." but no source. It would be helpful to know which tumor markers are not tumor antigens, and which tumor antigen can not be used as tumor markers, and why. - Rod57 (talk) 18:18, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]