Biomarkers in Ovarian Pathology: From Screening to Diagnosis. Review of the Literature

Ovarian cancer has a low incidence, but high mortality due to a habitual diagnosis in advanced cancer stages. Currently, used biomarkers have good sensitivity, but low specificity.

To determine the usefulness of the biomarkers and algorithms used up to now in the screening, diagnosis, response to treatments and identification of recurrence in patients with ovarian masses.

Systematic search of publications in English in the Medline-PubMed database with the terms: "biomarkers", "tumour", "tumour biomarkers", "marker", "tumour marker", "ovarian cancer", "ovarian", "Neoplasms", "cancer", CA-125 Antigen; Human Epididymis-specific Protein E4; Risk of Malignancy Index (RMI); Risk of Ovarian Malignancy Algorithm (ROMA); Ovarian Neoplasms. Original articles, clinical trials, reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, published between January 2000 and November 2020, were selected to determine the usefulness (among others) of CA 125 and HE4 antigen in ovarian cancer.

Finally, 39 transcendental publications were selected to write this article to determine the usefulness of tumour markers and algorithms in ovarian cancer.

The usefulness of the tumour markers antigen CA125 and antigen HE4 individually or as a basis for decision-making algorithms has low specificity; however, there is little evidence that confirms their usefulness as markers in ovarian cancer screening.