Screening for ovarian cancer

Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death from gynecologic cancer. Despite aggressive cytoreductive surgery and platinum-based chemotherapy, the 5-year survival for patients with clinically advanced ovarian cancer is only 15 to 20 percent, although the cure rate for stage I disease is usually greater than 90 percent. These statistics provide the primary rationale for ovarian cancer screening. This overview of the current literature serves to show that mass screening for ovarian cancer is far from being established and fraught with management and procedural dilemmas. The reasonable assumption being that there is little evidence to support widespread screening of large populations of women who do not have familial or genetic risk factors for ovarian cancer.