June 10th, 2011 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Health Tips
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In a large multicenter study enrolling over 70,000 women, annual screening with transvaginal pelvic ultrasound and ca125 blood testing did not reduce deaths from ovarian cancer, and in fact led to an increase in complications due to screening.
Investigators in the NCI-sponsored Prostate, Lung and Ovarian Cancer (PLCO) Screening trial randomly assigned over 78,000 women age 55-64 years of age to either annual screening with transvaginal pelvic sonograms for 4 years plus CA125 testing for 6 years or usual care at 10 study sites across the US., and followed the groups for up to 13 years. Over that time period, ovarian cancer rates in the screened group were 5.7 per 10,000 person-years vs 4.7 per 10,000 persons-years in the usual care group, with 3.1 deaths vs 2.6 deaths per 10,000 person years, respectively. Over 3000 women had false positive screening results, a third of whom had surgery and 15% of those operated on had a complications from their surgery. Deaths from other causes did not differ between the groups.
The investigators concluded that annual screening for ovarian cancer does not reduce mortality, and in fact caused harms among women with fals positive abnormal results.
This is not the first study that failed to find efficacy for ultrasound and ca125 in reducing mortality from ovarian cancer, but Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog That Ate Manhattan*
January 17th, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Health Tips, Research
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Cancer of the ovary is a particularly nasty disease. It often remains asymptomatic until it has reached an advanced, incurable stage, and scientists have been unable to develop an effective screening test for the disease like the ones in widespread use for cancers of the breast and cervix.
The dismal status of ovarian cancer screening was underscored a year ago when an NIH-sponsored study showed that over 70 percent of cancers detected by transvaginal ultrasound and CA 125 biomarker testing — the two best ovarian screening tests we’ve got — had reached stage III or IV at the time the patients screened positive. That’s about what happens when women aren’t screened at all.
That wasn’t the worst of it, however. In just the first year of that screening program, positive test results obligated 566 surgical procedures which uncovered only 18 cancers. That’s an awful lot of unnecessary surgery and associated morbidity right there. Things were no better on the false-negative side of things. Overall, 89 cases of ovarian cancer were diagnosed during the NIH study, and a third of them had been missed by both screening modalities.
What’s new?
The NIH study didn’t evaluate the impact of screening on ovarian cancer mortality, but a recent study by Laura Havrilesky and colleagues at Duke did indeed address the point. Sadly, the results were abysmal. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*