Ovarian cancer symptoms in pre-clinical invasive epithelial ovarian cancer – An exploratory analysis nested within the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening
https://tinyurl.com/2nj7cv48
Ovarian cancer is hard to diagnose, no screening test has so far been shown to be effective. Because of this difficulty women are advised to look out for subtle changes thought to be predictors of later disease. These include bowel symptoms such as bloating, dyspepsia and altered bowel habit.
It seems that this advice is intuitive rather than objective, this study aims to use the mass of data from the UKCTOCS trial to determine the importance of such advice.
UKCTOCS was a huge trial over 15 years involving more than 200000 women which ultimately failed to show any increase in survival from ovarian cancer when an array of screening tests was used. As part of the information sought at commencement the women were asked about bowel symptoms.
Of the 202 women who were actively screened and developed ovarian cancer, 35% had previously described bowel symptoms. For the non-screened 874 women who developed ovarian cancer, only 9% had previously described bowel symptoms.
It seems that once again there is no accurate discriminator for ovarian cancer outside the known high-risk groups. Some caution when interpreting these results should be exercised,as this is use of data for a purpose other than originally intended.
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