Higher serum calcium levels may be a biomarker of ovarian cancer

The “take-home” message from our paper is that there is a pressing need for markers of ovarian cancer that could detect the disease at an early, curable stage, much like a smoke-detector can detect a small fire before it is impossible to contain.  Our findings that serum calcium levels that are high, but not yet abnormal (high normo-calcemia) predicted both incident and fatal ovarian cancer suggest that high serum calcium could identify women with subclinical ovarian cancer, potentially leading to a diagnosis before the disease became clinically apparent  

Bibliographic Reference:

Schwartz GG et al.: "Prospective studies of total and ionized serum calcium in relation to incident and fatal ovarian cancer", Gynecol Oncol. 2013 Jan 9 [Epub ahead of print]

Gary Schwartz

Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA