Prognostic Significance of Preoperative Serum Carcinoembryonic Antigen Varies with Lymph Node Metastasis Status in Colorectal Cancer

Background. Preoperative serum level of carcinoembryonic antigen (pCEA) is generally recognized as a prognostic factor for colorectal cancer (CRC), but the stage-specific role of pCEA in colorectal cancer remains unclear. Objective. We investigated the prognostic significance of pCEA levels in different tumor stages of nonmetastatic CRC patients. Methods. Six hundred and fifteen CRC patients at stage I–III were retrospectively analyzed. All of them received curative tumor resection. The X-tile program was used to generate stage-specific cutoff values of pCEA for all patients and two subpopulations (lymph node-positive or -negative). The prognostic significance of pCEA was assessed using Kaplan–Meier analysis and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis. A nomogram model that combined pCEA score and clinical feature indexes was established and evaluated. Results. Two cutoff values were identified in the study population. At a cutoff value of 4.9 ng/mL, a significantly higher 5-year overall survival (OS) rate (82.16%) was observed in the pCEA-low group (<4.9 ng/mL) compared with 65.52% in the pCEA-high group (≥4.9 ng/mL). Furthermore, at the second cutoff value of 27.2 ng/mL, 5-year OS was found to be only 40.9%. Stratification analysis revealed that preoperative serum level of pCEA was an independent prognostic factor (OR = 1.991, P < 0.01 ) in the subpopulation of lymph node metastasis (stage III) patients, and the relative survival rates in the pCEA-low (≤4.9 ng/mL), pCEA-medium (4.9–27.2 ng/mL), and pCEA-high (≥27.2 ng/mL) groups were 73.4%, 60.5%, and 24.8%, respectively ( P < 0.05 ). However, no such effect was observed in the lymph node nonmetastasis (stage I and II) subgroup. The established nomogram showed acceptable predictive power of the 5-year OS rate (C-index: 0.612) in lymph node-positive CRC patients, with an area under the curve value of 0.772, as assessed by ROC curve analysis. Conclusions. Pretreatment serum CEA levels had different prognostic significance based on the lymph node metastasis status. Among stage III CRC patients, pCEA was an independent prognostic factor. Five-year OS rates could be predicted according to the individual pCEA level at the different cutoff values.