Preliminary analysis reveals predictive potential of serum tumor markers for occult lymph node metastasis in early small cell lung cancer, suggesting utility for staging.
In their letter-to-the-editor entitled “Letter to the Editor: Incidence rate of occult lymph node metastasis in clinical T 1 − 2 N 0 M 0 small cell lung cancer patients and radiomic prediction based on contrast-enhanced CT imaging: a multicenter study”, Prof. Chen et al. provided insightful comments and suggestions on our original study. We appreciate the authors’ feedback and have conducted a preliminary exploration of the predictive value of serum tumor markers (TMs) for occult lymph node metastasis (OLM) in clinical T 1 − 2 N 0 M 0 (cT 1 − 2 N 0 M 0 ) small cell lung cancer (SCLC) patients. The results indicate that neuron-specific enolase (NSE), carbohydrate antigen 125 (CA125), and squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCC) have potential predictive value for detecting OLM in cT 1 − 2 N 0 M 0 SCLC patients. Additionally, further exploration and confirmation through prospective, large-scale studies with robust external validation are needed.
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Jiang et al. (2024) studied this question.
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