CYFRA 21-1 in urine: a diagnostic marker for endometriosis?

Risto Gjavotchanoff
International journal of women's health · 2015 · vol. 7 , pp. 205 · doi:10.2147/ijwh.s75288 · PMID:25709504 · PMC4332289 · W1987304256
article OA: gold CC0 ⤵ 4 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-09 ⓘ

Urine CYFRA 21-1 concentrations increased significantly in the late follicular phase of women with endometriosis compared to healthy controls, suggesting its potential as a noninvasive diagnostic marker.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-09 ⓘ

This study measured urinary cytokeratin 19 fragment (CYFRA 21-1) using a highly sensitive chemiluminescent microparticle immunoassay in 37 women presenting for reproductive care, comparing endometriosis patients’ urine samples across menstrual phases with controls who were not on hormone therapy. CYFRA 21-1, corrected for urinary creatinine, was significantly elevated in the late follicular phase in endometriosis patients versus healthy controls, and levels decreased again in the luteal phase. Using a cutoff of >4 ng/mL/gCREA, most follicular-phase samples were classified as pathological, but the authors noted limitations including relatively small group sizes and reduced sample usability due to factors such as bacteriuria (and the need for creatinine correction for circadian variation). This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it tests whether cyclically increased urinary CYFRA 21-1 could serve as a noninvasive diagnostic marker for clinically manifesting endometriosis.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Diagnostic workup of endometriosis usually involves laparoscopic inspection and histological examination of biopsies. Unequivocal laboratory parameters for this ailment have not been available in routine diagnostic evaluations thus far. In this study, we examined urine concentrations of cytokeratin 19 (CYFRA 21-1), a structural protein specific for epithelia. We performed immunoassays for CYFRA 21-1 in urine samples from women afflicted with endometriosis throughout their menstrual cycle. We observed a significant increase in CYFRA 21-1 concentrations, corrected by creatinine levels, in the late follicular phase as compared with the level in healthy controls. We conclude that cyclically increased CYFRA 21-1 concentrations in urine could serve as a valuable noninvasive diagnostic parameter in the workup of clinically manifesting endometriosis.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosis

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (37)

Cited by (4)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-16T06:07:01.518242+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:18:04.362919+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK