IL6 and lung cancer: When distinguishing stage IIIA from IIB of lung cancer, the combination of CEA, IL-6, and LDH has the highest sensitivity of 72.73%, a specificity of 94.44%, and an AUC value of 0.8686, whereas a model with the lowest AIC value consists of TNF-α, lactate, and LDH, characterized by lower sensitivity (54.55%) and slightly lower specificity (88.24%) and AUC (0.8609).