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It is still not clear, for many pathologies, if it is useful to treat patients at the time of a biological relapse or at the time of clinical relapse.

Except when a curative treatment may be instituted (local treatment for breast cancer, local radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy, partial hepatectomy after a unique metastasis of colon cancer), generally for most cancers there is no real curative treatment that should be set up as soon as possible, according to a real scientific study.

	En [1], this would be the ideal treatment : the patient is treated when the biology shows an increased elevated marker. Survival is increased by an early treatment.
	En [2], the early treatment is worse than the late treatment because of the toxicity of the treatment or due to lateral damages (like for estrogens for prostate cancer in the famous veteran trials).
	En [3], this is probably the usual situation. There is no clinical proof of the efficiency of an early treatment. Since every treatment (even hormone treatments) brings toxicity, a clear balance should be made between benefits and toxicities. Most of the time physicians and patients act without precise knowledge.

Thus, since we do not know what is the better to treat patients early (when markers rise) or later (when clinical symptoms appear), it is not clear if the habit to regularly measure the markers is useful clinically and even psychologically.

A clinical watch is often enough.