Procalcitonin Elevation without Sepsis: Can it be a Tumor Marker? A Case Report and Literature Review

Procalcitonin is a protein which has an important role in diagnosis and predicting prognosis of sepsis. Despite sepsis procalcitonin levels were found to be high in some malignant patients especially in neuroendocrine tumors. There are studies showing the relationship between procalcitonin levels and disease stage, prognosis and recurrence. Most of the cases in these studies are medullary thyroid cancer cases. There was limited data about procalsitonin level in other solid tumors. Our case is a metastatic lung cancer patient with neuroendocrine component.