Research progress of CA125 in endometriosis: Teaching an old dog new tricks

After decades of research, we still face great challenges on endometriosis in terms of diagnosis and management. Serum CA125 has been used in the clinical practice in endometriosis, and many large-scale clinical trials have been conducted or are underway to determine potential use of serum CA125 levels in endometriosis. In this article, relevant articles that addressed endometriosis associated with CA125 were searched for and retrieved from the databases PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library. Here we provide an in-depth literature review to depict CA125 dynamic expression in female reproductive tract and to highlight the practical value of CA125 in diagnosing endometriosis, distinguishing the severity of the disease, monitoring the effect of treatment and reflecting malignant transformation. So far, the development of a risk stratification system based on biomarker CA125 for endometriosis may help clinicians in making novel and more efficient strategies for the detection and treatment of endometriosis. In order to improve CA125 specificity and sensitivity, further research is needed to determine its diagnostic cut-off value.