Prognostic Value of Preoperative Serum CA 242 in Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal cancer (EC) is the 8th most common cancer worldwide, with 482,000 new cases in 2008, and the 6th most common cause of death from cancer, with 406,000 deaths (Ferlay et al., 2010). According to the GLOBOCAN project in 2008, China was estimated to account for 53.6% of the new cases and 51.7% of the deaths worldwide respectively (Ferlay et al., 2010). Thus, China still suffers a great disease burden from EC. Although advances have occurred in the multidisciplinary treatment, surgical resection remains the modality of choice. The overall 5-year survival after surgical resection is poor, the reason of that is the relatively late stage of diagnosis and rapid clinical progression (Lerut et al., 1994; Ferguson et al., 1997; Mao et al., 2011; Mirinezhad et al., 2012). Therefore, assessing the prognostic factors in EC patients will become more and more important. Serum tumor markers play an important role in cancer diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and monitoring (Chen et al., 2004; Jiang et al., 2012). Thus, in order to further improve the survival rate of EC patients, it is essential to explore and identify relevant biomarkers with adverse prognosis. Recent publications have suggested that CA 242 is inversely related to prognosis in many cancers, high CA 242 is associated with poor prognosis (Kuusela