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The Community Oncologist

False Tumor Marker Surge Evoked by Peripheral Blood Stem Cell Transplantation

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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