[Urinary neopterin: its value in the study of various neoplasms]

A systematic study of urinary Neopterin was carried out, gathering two thousand five hundred measurements, on a hospital population of patients supposedly affected by tumors and the concentrations obtained were compared to the usual values determined at the same time on patients apparently free from any disease. Malignant tumors appear to be associated with high concentration of urinary Neopterin and this increase seems well correlated with the severity of the disease. Benign tumors correspond, on the contrary, to an appreciably normal excretion of Neopterin. A clinic study of Neopterin elimination specifies, however, that each elevated value must be followed with other determinations in order to rule out the possibility of an eventual viral infection at the incubation stage. The authors think that this dosage could represent a mean of discovery of professional cancers in high risk populations as well as an element in the supervision of anti-neoplastic treatments.