Background: the present study was under taken to determine the role of CA-125 in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis (AA), to prevent its complications and also in preventing negative appendicectomies in tertiary care hospital.
Methods: The study was conducted at a tertiary care and research center between 01/03/2018 to 30/06/2019. Patients admitted to the surgery department with diagnosis of AA were considered for the study. After informed consent, a, standardized history was obtained as a case Performa. Serum samples from all the cases with clinical diagnosis of AA were obtained and stored. Only the cases with histopathologically approved AA were included in the study. Cases operated for clinical diagnosis of AA, but not histopathologically proven AA was not included in the study. CA125 levels in cases with definitive diagnosis of AA were measured.
Results: In present study, ROC curve analysis revealed the sensitivity of 87.27 % and specificity of 90.91 % when the CA 125 cut-off value of > 16.8 was taken to diagnose acute appendicitis. AUC was 0.911 with a standard error of 0.0292.
Conclusion: In this study we have observed that CA125 showed a positive correlation with acute appendicitis, that was statistically not significant (P>0.05). We didn’t evaluate the correlation with the disease severity. We consider that CA125 can be used as a marker in acute appendicitis cases although further research is still needed.
Keywords: CA125, Acute Appendicitis, Surgery.
How to improve the clinical diagnosis of acute appendicitis in resource limited settings
