Intestinal surgery in treatment of advanced ovarian cancer--review of our experience

In cases of advanced ovarian cancer bowel surgery is necessary during the primary surgical procedure, in the course of the disease for recurrence or palliation of the symptoms. Treatment with maximal cytoreductive surgery followed by chemotherapy in women with advanced ovarian cancer is well established.

We retrospectivly evaluated 56 women who were surgically treated for ovarian cancer over five years (from 2004 to 2008) at the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Clinical Center of Serbia. In 56 patients, 82 intestine operations were performed, which means that in some patients more than one intestine operation was performed. We analyzed patient characteristics, tumor features, intraoperative findings, pelvic node involvement, surgical procedure performed, indications for bowel surgery, and early postoperative complications.

In our study the majority of patients had Stage III (82%) or IV (10%) carcinoma with poor differentiation. Epithelial ovarian cancer was the most common histopathological finding (78%) in our group of patients. There were 30 cases (53%) with serous, nine (16%) with mucinous and five (9%) with endometriod tumors. Bowel surgery was indicated in 12.2% of our patients with ovarian cancer which was mostly performed to reduce the volume of the tumor (68%), while it was indicated in recurrence of the disease in 18% of women. In addition to the standard surgery procedure, which includes removal of internal genital organs, omentum minus/majus, peritoneal tumor masses, large and small bowel resection were performed. Of 56 patients most underwent small bowel surgery--43 of a total of 82 intestinal operations (52.4%). Of these we performed small bowel resection in 34 (41.5% of all intestinal operations), while ileostomy and jejunostomy were performed in nine cases (11%). There were 39 colon operations (47.6%) and most of the cases underwent rectosygmoid resection with the Hartman procedure (33 or 40.2% of all intestinal operations). Other colon operations included hemicolectomy (3 cases--3.7%), transverse colon resection (2 cases--2.4%) and pancolectomy (1 case--1.2%). According to our experience, wound infection and febrile morbidity were the most common early postoperative complications. Mortality rates in the literature vary between 0% and 8%, and anastomotic complications between 0 and 4%, which is in agreement with our results.

Radical surgical procedures in treatment of ovarian cancer including multi-organ resection are necesery to achieve a minimal residual disease state prior to initiating adjuvant chemotherapy. Bowel preparation and CT/MR imaging should be performed in patients with possible malignant ovarian masses.