In a patient with a history of treated stage II seminoma with rising bHCG while on surveillance, do you routinely recheck the bHCG with a different assay?

Topics: Genitourinary Cancers • Medical Oncology • Testicular Cancer

When are you concerned for a false positive? FDA guidelines include a suggestion to try another assay in case heterophile antibodies are causing a false positive, but we cannot find a lab that does an alternative assay.

Answer from: Medical Oncologist at Community Practice

In this setting, it depends a lot of the confidence you have in the treatment and the degree of HCG elevation. It also depends to some degree on whether the patient had an HCG elevation when he presented with stage II disease. In most of these cases these are very low level HCG elevations tha...

Comments

Medical Oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital
I totally agree with @Craig R. Nichols. The additi...

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