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The Community Oncologist |
Department of Urology, Tokyo Medical and Dental University Graduate School, Tokyo, Japan
Key Words. Peripheral blood stem cell transplantation • Tumor marker surges • Testicular cancer • Human chorionic gonadotropin
Correspondence: Fumitaka Koga, M.D., Department of Urology, Tokyo Medical and Dental University Graduate School, 1-5-45 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8519, Japan. Telephone and Fax: 81-3-5803-5295; e-mail: f-koga.uro{at}tmd.ac.jp
Received December 24, 2007; accepted for publication March 24, 2008.
Disclosure: No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.
Peripheral blood stem cell transplantation (PBSCT) allows multiple intensive chemotherapy treatments and hematopoietic progenitor cell rescues for poor-risk patients with a variety of malignancies. We report false surges of a tumor marker, serum human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), evoked by PBSCT in the course of chemotherapy for a poor-risk testicular cancer patient. We confirmed that this phenomenon resulted from reinfusion of peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) containing hCG at a high concentration, collected when the patient's serum hCG levels were remarkably elevated. This is the first report to demonstrate false tumor marker surges caused by PBSCT. Because a rapid rise in tumor markers may demand an immediate change in the therapeutic strategy, physicians should be aware of the possibility of this phenomenon when treating poor-risk cancer patients whose tumor markers are remarkably elevated at the time of PBSC harvest.
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