New Guidelines Should Improve Ovarian Cancer Detection

By Dennis ThompsonHealthDay ReporterSun Oct 28, 6:59 PM ET
SUNDAY, Oct. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Ovarian cancer has long had a reputation as a silent killer, because many people believed it gave no warning signs until far advanced.
But women suffering from the disease knew differently. They knew they had certain symptoms that were common from patient to patient.
"Survivors for years have said there are symptoms for the disease, but no one listened to them," said Jane Langridge, chief executive officer for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition.
Now, doctors have agreed with them.
A screening test has been developed that, in one study, accurately detected early stage ovarian cancer 57 percent of the time.
Based on that and similar studies, experts from the American Cancer Society, the Gynecologic Cancer Foundation and the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists have agreed on a set of symptoms that can be signs of early ovarian cancer.
"We want people to know it's not the silent killer. There are symptoms women can bring to their doctors that are important to pay attention to," said Dr. Linda Duska, a member of the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition's medical advisory board and a gynecologic oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, in Boston.
"This agreement is significant in the fact that, maybe if we pay more attention to symptoms, we can catch them sooner and have more success in treating them," she continued.
Early detection of ovarian cancer is crucial.
More than 22,000 U.S. women will be diagnosed with the disease this year, and three-fourths of them -- more than 15,000 -- will die from it, according to the National Cancer Institute.
If caught in the early stages, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer is 90 percent. But 75 percent of women are still diagnosed in the advanced stages, when the prognosis is poor.
Ovarian cancer is the eighth most common cancer among American women, not including skin cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. An estimated two-thirds of women with ovarian cancer are 55 or older.
"It is a disease that is detected in stage 3 and above, and that is unacceptable," said Sherry Salway Black, executive director of the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance and a survivor of the disease. "Our mortality figures are unacceptable."
The symptoms of ovarian cancer can be subtle and hard to assess, because they often mimic common digestive and gastrointestinal disorders. They include persistent swelling, bloating, pressure or pain in the abdomen, gastrointestinal upset, difficulty eating or feeling full quickly, and the frequent or urgent need to urinate.
Because these symptoms are so common, women should be careful not to assume the worst, Duska said.
"The goal of this is not to make everyone think they have ovarian cancer," she said. "If women have these symptoms, and they persist over time, they should have them investigated. Everyone with bloating does not have ovarian cancer."
Typically, two or more symptoms occur simultaneously and increase in severity over time, according to the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition.
The screening test developed late last year involves an extensive checklist of symptoms and their frequency. It picked up early stage ovarian cancer 56.7 percent of the time, and late stage ovarian cancer 80 percent of the time. The test also produced "false-positive" findings 10 percent to 13 percent of the time.
The test searches for many of the symptoms agreed upon by cancer experts as indicative of ovarian cancer.
"When women go to their doctors and have had some of these symptoms, and they are new and have persisted for two or more weeks, perhaps a doctor now would be willing to perform some pretty simple tests to rule out ovarian cancer," Langridge said.
Women who have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer are at increased risk and should pay particular attention to the symptoms, Duska said.
Treatment of ovarian cancer usually involves a combination of surgery and chemotherapy. Advances in chemotherapy have made the late-stage disease more survivable, Duska said.
In a more intensive regimen recently shown to improve survival, standard intravenous chemotherapy is combined with chemotherapy injected directly into the abdominal cavity. The abdominal injection exposes hard-to-reach cancer cells to higher levels of chemotherapy than can be reached intravenously.
"That was a breakthrough, I think," Duska said.
Other treatments being explored include new chemotherapy drugs, vaccines, gene therapy and immunotherapy, which boosts the body's own immune system to help combat cancer, according to the Mayo Clinic.
More information
To learn more about ovarian cancer, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.