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Updated: Nov 12, 2025
Quantitation of Intra-peritoneal Ovarian Cancer Metastasis
Published on: July 18, 2016
Early stage epithelial ovarian cancer metastasis through peritoneal fluid circulation
Sigit Purbadi1, Tricia Dewi Anggraeni2, Angelina Vitria2
1Division of Gynecologic Oncology. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital, Jakarta, Indonesia. sigitpurbadi@gmail.com.
Background:
Although epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) spreads through peritoneal circulation, all patients with clinical early-stage ovarian cancer (OC) benefit from routine surgical staging is still unclear.
Methods:
This cross-sectional study used data from medical records of patients with clinical early-stage EOC who received complete surgical staging from 2006 to 2016 at our hospital. We excluded patients with non-epithelial OC or with stage IV disease.
Results:
Among 50 patients with clinical early-stage EOC who underwent surgical staging, biopsies showed EOC cells in peritoneal fluid for 12 patients (24%), in peritoneal tissue for ten patients (20%), and omental tissue for eight patients (16%). Of those 50 patients, 40 patients had undergone peritoneal biopsies, and the other five patients also had omental biopsies. The results showed that only one (2.5%) from 40 patients with peritoneal biopsy and three (6.7%) from 45 patients with omental biopsy had no visible nodules. From cytology examination, 3 out of 26 patients (11.5%) showed positive cytology from peritoneal washing.
Conclusions:
Routine peritoneal biopsies do not seem advantageous for patients with clinical early-stage EOC as negative visible nodules with positive biopsy results were only 1 in 40 cases. However, further study with a larger cohort is needed to obtain more information on peritoneal fluid metastasis patterns.
