Women's Health: A Simple Test for Ovarian Cancer?
A simple survey could be the key to detecting the most deadly gynecologic cancer before it's too late. Ovarian cancer has long been called a "silent killer" because the early-stage disease offers so little hint of its presence. But a new study suggests that attention to the frequency and duration of particular symptoms could be an important tool in targeting the disease early.
According to the study, women with certain symptoms—abdominal or pelvic pain, increased abdominal size, bloating, difficulty eating or feeling full quickly—that occurred more than 12 times per month and started within a year were at higher risk of ovarian cancer. While women and doctors often dismiss such vague early signs as mere digestive ills, researchers found the "symptom index" predicted the disease 57 percent of the time in women with early-stage ovarian cancer and 80 percent of the time in women with an advanced stage of the disease, making a case for women who test positive on the index to get further screening.
"This is a test that costs no money, and women can do it themselves," says Barbara Goff, professor and director of gynecologic oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and lead author of the study, which will appear in the Jan. 15, 2007, issue of the journal CANCER and is currently available online. Indeed, Goff and her team found that using the index as a preliminary screening tool was approximately as effective as using CA-125, the blood biomarker test for ovarian cancer, and far more cost-effective. Using the blood test as a prescreening tool for the general public hasn't been recommended because it yields too many false positives and false negatives, experts say.
"More than 75 percent of women are diagnosed in stages three and four," says Sherry Salway Black, ovarian cancer survivor and executive director of the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance. Increasing women's awareness of the symptom index, Black believes, could help prevent some of the 15,000 deaths from ovarian cancer that are expected in 2006 alone.
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