[Treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer]

Significant prolongation of survival time among the patients with advanced ovarian cancer has been brought under the development of surgery and chemotherapy, but even those with clinical remission shows sometimes recurrence. For the recurrent ovarian cancer patients at present there are no definite strategy to treat the recurrent cases. Under these circumstance, we have reviewed the current treatment of cytoreductive surgery and chemotherapy for the recurrent cases. 1) surgical treatment Generally, in the cases of recurrent ovarian cancer, cytoreductive surgery is required to minimize the residual tumour in the abdomen. But sometimes we can find the distant metastasis including liver, lung, and lymph node. This means that surgery is not sufficient for control of recurrent tumor. Further adjuvant chemotherapy will be required to control metastatic tumors. 2) chemotherapy After the detail assessment of the initial treatment of cases, at first we should think about retreatment with CDDP-based regimen and secondly about dose-intensification of CDDP or CBDCA for the CDDP-resistant cases. And as combination regimens, topoisomerase inhibitors, etoposide or CPT-11 are also preferable to use, alkylating agents such as ifosfamide, 5-fluorouracil, and some current trials with new drug, taxol are effective for recurrent cases. In conclusion, further active chemotherapy using platinum compounds, topoisomerase inhibitors, taxol will be achieved for the control of the recurrent cases of ovarian cancer.