If You Give A Mouse A Cookie...

If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk
Laura Joffe Numeroff, If You Give a Mouse A Cookie

If you give a scientist some data, he's going to graph them.

Gracias a mi amigo madrileño for graphing the CEA levels.  Some of you are asking, "Where are the controls?"  Well, this is a case study, no controls and n=1.  But we'll still write five paragraphs of conclusions, won't we.

I searched PubMed to find correlations between CEA levels and prognosis.  The most recent paper (from Korea) concluded that patients with a decline in CEA levels after surgery fared somewhat better than patients who did not.  The study included 352 patients. It's unfortunate that, with an estimated 100K new cases of colorectal cancer per year in the US, there is no large, accessible database to capture simple clinical data for estimating prognoses - but that's a rant for another time.

I have a stack of printouts from all my blood work, going back to July.  Maybe I should send them to Madrid and we'll get really nice graphs of my blood counts, hemoglobin, etc.