But the impact of an early diagnosis is stark. About 90 in 100 women survive early-stage ovarian cancer for five years or more, compared with just 3 in every 100 women with late-stage disease.
This is why – nearly 15 years ago – we began co-funding a huge trial to find out whether regularly screening healthy women could spot ovarian cancers before they cause symptoms, when treatment is more likely to be successful.
The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) is run by Professor Ian Jacobs, who’s now based at the University of New South Wales Australia, and Professor Usha Menon from University College London, both of whom are gynaecologists who have worked on the problem of early diagnosis of ovarian cancer for many years.
And since it began, the trial has uncovered a whole range of important information about the potential of ovarian cancer screening, including how effective different tests can be at detecting cancers, and how women are affected emotionally by participating in ovarian cancer screening.
Today, the trial team have published one of their most long-awaited findings: their first analysis of whether ovarian cancer screening could actually prevent deaths from the disease.
But there’s a frustrating catch – while the data seems to show a possible benefit, there’s still a lot of statistical uncertainty in the results, and it’s far from clear how many lives it would save in practice.
So the researchers want to follow the women on the trial for a few more years to see for sure whether screening does actually save lives, and to show how that stacks up against the harms (which include unnecessary surgery and potential complications).
And while today’s result is important, there are several things that follow from it:
We don’t think there’s enough evidence for the NHS to introduce a national screening programme at this stage.
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