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Wednesday, February 04, 2004High levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP, in a patient's blood "could become a very good early marker" for predicting the colon disorder, said Northwestern University cancer specialist Dr. Boris Pasche. ...The Hopkins researchers, who published their report today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed blood samples from a long-term study of people in Washington County. They compared 131 people who got colon cancer with 262 people who did not. "People with high levels of CRP had a significantly higher risk of developing colon cancer sometime in the future," said Dr. Thomas Erlinger, the study's lead author. The abstract is here, but it doesn't give much in the way of concrete information. (My copy of JAMA hasn't arrived yet, so I can't scrutinize the data.) But, using C-reactive protein as a screening test for anything is a worrisome trend. It can be elevated in any sort of condition that is associated with inflammation - from arthrities it Alzheimer's. So its prognostic value is severely limited. As one doctor puts it in the article: "It's like smoke going up - you know there's a fire somewhere, but you don't know where." posted by Sydney on 2/04/2004 08:17:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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