Document Type
Journal Article
Publisher
Sage
School
School of Medical and Health Sciences
RAS ID
22436
Abstract
Blood samples were collected serially from 14 women with healthy pregnancies, beginning in gestational week 4 at the time of a positive pregnancy test through to the identification of a foetal heart by ultrasound. Six biomarkers were measured in the serum retrospectively including two reproductive hormones (progesterone and human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG)) and four additional biomarkers (prostate-specific antigen (PSA), cancer antigen 15-3 (CA15-3), cancer antigen 125 (CA125) and pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A)) measured on a Siemens Centaur XP and a Roche Cobas e411 automated analysers, respectively. The progesterone and hCG results were unremarkable following established patterns, but distinctive patterns of change were seen in the other four biomarkers during this period of early pregnancy. PAPP-A and PSA levels rose steadily as the pregnancies progressed, while CA125 levels rose until week 5.5 and then returned to baseline values. CA15-3 serum concentrations were observed to drop as the pregnancies progressed. These biomarker results suggest further investigation is warranted to allow a non-invasive correlation of the biomarkers with the various stages of embryogenesis, implantation and placentation.
DOI
10.1177/2058915816672102
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
Comments
Stemp, M.J., Roberts, P., McClements, A., Chapple, V., Matson, P.L. (2016). Serum concentrations of the biomarkers CA125, CA15-3, PSA and PAPP-A in early pregnancy. Journal of Reproductive Biotechnology and Fertility. 5(1), 1-6.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2058915816672102