Early Ovarian Cancer May Cause Symptoms
Excerpt By Merritt McKinney

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Ovarian cancer is generally thought to have no tell-tale symptoms, particularly in its early stages. But New York researchers report that the disease may indeed cause some recognizable symptoms, even early on.

The knowledge that ovarian cancer can cause identifiable symptoms may lead to earlier detection of the disease, according to the study's authors.

About 23,000 women in the US develop ovarian cancer each year. With early detection, the outlook for women with ovarian cancer is good. But the cancer is rarely caught early, in part because symptoms such as bloating and abdominal discomfort can signal any number of problems.

Most women are not diagnosed until a later stage of the disease, when the odds of surviving more than 5 years are small. Each year, about 14,000 US women die from ovarian cancer.

The symptoms of ovarian cancer are often thought to be ''vague and nonspecific,'' according to Dr. Sara H. Olson of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

But a study conducted by Olson and her colleagues suggests that even though the symptoms experienced by women with ovarian cancer are common in healthy women, they are more common and slightly different in nature in women with the disease.

The researchers asked 168 women with ovarian cancer and 251 similarly aged healthy women how often they had symptoms such as unusual bloating, abdominal pain, nausea, lack of energy and lower back pain.

Both women with ovarian cancer and healthy women reported having had these symptoms, but with the exception of nausea, the symptoms were much more common in women with ovarian cancer, the authors report in the August issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

And the nature of the symptoms varied a bit between women with and without cancer, according to the report. In women with cancer, bloating, fullness and pressure in the abdomen tended to be constant, rather than intermittent, as it was in healthy women. These symptoms also tended to develop shortly before the women were diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

And despite the belief that early ovarian cancer causes few or no symptoms, there were few differences between the symptoms of women whose disease was detected early rather than late. Almost 9 out of 10 women diagnosed at an early stage had at least one cancer symptom before diagnosis.

The findings may be a wake-up call for women with these sorts of symptoms to see a physician, Olson told Reuters Health in an interview.

Unlike the mammogram used to detect breast cancer, there is no feasible test for screening for ovarian cancer, she said. Doctors identify cancer in women using ultrasound testing.

SOURCE: Obstetrics & Gynecology 2001;98:212-217.

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