Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA 19-9) is a glycosphingolipid of the Lewis blood group that for years has been proposed as a useful marker for epithelial type gastrointestinal cancers. It is well known that moderately increased concentrations of CA 19-9 can be found in 15–36% of patients with benign conditions such as pancreatic, liver, biliary diseases and benign hydronephrosis. In current study, we aimed to investigate whether there was any tendency CA 19-9 elevation in patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.

Patients and method: Seventy one patients with diagnosis of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis were included in the study. Patients with malignancy, benign pancreas, liver, lung and biliary diseases, inflammatory bowel diseases, urinary tract infection, hydronephrosis, endometriosis, diabetes mellitus and chronic renal failure were excluded from the study.

Results: In patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, mean serum CA 19-9 level was 12.5±10.4 (range, 2.5–55) while it was 11.9±9 (range, 2.5–29.3) and 10.3±8 (range, 2.5–28.9) in patients with Graves’ and healthy volunteers respectively. There was no significant difference between Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and control groups with regard to the serum CA 19-9 levels.

Conclusion: Although the American Society of Clinical Oncology does not recommend tumor markers like CA 19-9 in screening for malignancies, they may be used for this purpose. In contrast to case reports showing the possible elevation of CA 19-9 in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, we did not detect such a relation. Moreover, there was no clue for the change in CA 19-9 levels in patients with hypo, hyper or euthyroidism.