Early Detection of Ovarian Cancer Remains Difficult | HealthInfi

Ovarian cancer is often detected at an advanced stage, which generally results in a poor prognosis. Early diagnosis might be the most important step toward reducing morbidity and mortality, but current diagnostic tests are ineffective for early detection of the disease.

Early detection of potentially lethal cancers is a difficult challenge but it holds huge potential for saving lives.

To significantly reduce the mortality rate, tests would have to be able to detect tumors less than 1 cm in diameter, according to an analysis published in the July 28 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.

“Early detection of potentially lethal cancers is a difficult challenge but it holds huge potential for saving lives,” said study coauthor Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD, professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. “Since the potential clinical benefits are so great and the problem so challenging, we really need to put more resources into research directed at early detection.”

Window of Opportunity for Early Detection

The researchers note that even though there is a long “window of opportunity” for the early detection of tumors before they become incurable, developing a test that is sufficiently sensitive and specific to take advantage of that window is a challenge. Although most published studies have evaluated biomarkers on the basis of their ability to detect ovarian cancer in patients with tumors that are clinically apparent, their findings show that these “clinically apparent tumors are not good models for the tumors that an effective early-detection test would need to detect.”

Instead, early-stage serous ovarian tumors are rarely larger than a few millimeters in diameter, and by the time they do actually become clinically apparent, most cancers are more than 200 times larger than the presymptomatic tumors a successful early-detection strategy must detect, they write.

More research and discovery is needed, according to Dr. Brown. “The best thing to do is to focus our research efforts toward detecting the very tiny cancers we will need to detect in order to save lives,” he told Medscape Oncology. “Unfortunately, we really don’t yet have any early-detection method that comes close to the performance that would be needed for a net benefit from early detection. The tests that are available today can almost never detect potentially lethal cancers while they are still at a curable stage; they are much more likely to lead to unnecessary surgery.”

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