Ovarian cancer researchers disappointed after trial finds regular screenings fail to reduce deaths
A decades-long study on ovarian cancer has found that annual screening for the cancer did not ultimately reduce the number of deaths from the disease, says British researcher Usha Menon.
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Posted: May 13, 2021 5:25 PM ET | Last Updated: May 13
A study that offered annual screening to more than 200,000 women did not find a reduction in ovarian cancer deaths. (CBC)
Professor Ian Jacobs
I was motivated to improve the outcome for women with ovarian cancer by my experience as a junior doctor in London in 1985. But 36 years on, the results aren t what we d hoped.
Of all women’s cancers, ovarian cancer has the lowest survival rate, with just 46% of patients in Australia surviving five years. Photo: Shutterstock
My colleages’ and my efforts to develop a screening test for the early detection of ovarian cancer capable of saving lives arrived at a sad moment last week. The final trial results of the research I’ve focused on for 36 years, published in The Lancet, found early ovarian cancer detection doesn’t save lives.
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‘Devastated and sad’ after 36 years of research – early detection of ovarian cancer doesn’t save lives
My colleages’ and my efforts to develop a screening test for the early detection of ovarian cancer capable of saving lives arrived at a sad moment last week. The final trial results of the research I’ve focused on for 36 years, published in The Lancet, found early ovarian cancer detection doesn’t save lives.
Author President and Vice-Chancellor, UNSW
The advances we have seen in science and technology over the past three decades have been nothing short of phenomenal. Each smartphone has more computational power than NASA had at its disposal during the moon landings. In medicine, researchers have sequenced the human genome, created life-saving treatment for HIV and rapidly developed vaccines for COVID-19.
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Screening for ovarian cancer did not reduce deaths during study ANI | Updated: May 14, 2021 09:29 IST
London [UK], May 14 (ANI): A large-scale randomised trial of annual screening for ovarian cancer, led by UCL researchers, did not succeed in reducing deaths from the disease, despite one of the screening methods tested detecting cancers earlier.
Results from the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) have been published in a report in the medical journal The Lancet.
In the UK, 4,000 women die from ovarian cancer each year. It is not usually diagnosed until it is at a late stage and hard to treat. UKCTOCS was designed to test the hypothesis that a reliable screening method that picks up ovarian cancer earlier can save lives when treatments are more likely to be effective.