Beyond liver cancer, more application scenarios for alpha-fetoprotein in clinical practice

Chenyu Ma; Yuexinzi Jin; Yuhan Wang; Huaguo Xu; Jiexin Zhang

doi:10.3389/fonc.2023.1231420

Beyond liver cancer, more application scenarios for alpha-fetoprotein in clinical practice

Front Oncol. 2023 Sep 15:13:1231420. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2023.1231420. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Chenyu Ma¹, Yuexinzi Jin¹, Yuhan Wang², Huaguo Xu¹, Jiexin Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Laboratory Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital with Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China.
² Center of Smart Laboratory and Molecular Medicine, School of Medicine, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China.

Abstract

Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is a commonly used clinical biomarker. Before 1970, the two-way agar diffusion method was mainly used, and the specificity of AFP in the diagnosis of primary liver cancer was satisfactory. However, its positivity rate was not very high. The diagnostic value of AFP is changing with the evolution of detection methods. Here, we performed a literature search to identify English-language publications. The search was performed from January 2015 to April 2023 using the PubMed database and the following terms in [Titles/Abstracts]: alpha-fetoprotein, clinical practice, detection, etc. The references of retrieved articles were also screened to broaden the search. Studies referring to liver cancer and AFP detection methods were excluded. In this review, several clinical application scenarios for AFP were systematically reviewed, and its potential detection value in the future was discussed.

Keywords: alpha-fetoprotein; clinical application; fetal diseases; pregnancy; tumor.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the “The Six Top Talent Project” of Jiangsu Province (no. WSW-004) and Jiangsu Province Capability Improvement Project through Science and Technology and Education (no. ZDXK202239).