Eli5: How do tumor markers work?

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If tumor markers are made by both healthy and cancerous tissue, how are they used to identify a tumor?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically statistics. By themselves, tumour markers are not very useful because they can be produced by other things. But if you have a very specific set of conditions where the other things that can cause the tumour marker to show up are not happening and you really think that there’s a tumour, then the tumour marker is useful at giving you a good guess as to if there’s a tumour or not.