[Vision2020] False Promises on Ovarian Cancer

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=6c46ff2e/878a3ce7&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787510c_nyt5&ad=Sessions_120x60_Aug20_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fthesessions>

------------------------------
September 11, 2012
False Promises on Ovarian Cancer

New evidence that women are more likely to be harmed than helped by
screening tests for ovarian
cancer<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/ovarian-cancer/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>is
disturbing. The
tests do nothing<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/health/research/ovarian-cancer-tests-are-ineffective-medical-panel-says.html>to
prevent healthy women from dying from the usually fatal disease. Yet
they often lead doctors to perform needless surgeries that cause serious
complications in many patients.

The judgment<http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/uspsovar.htm>from
the United States Preventive Services Task Force, issued on Monday,
updates its longstanding verdict that healthy women with an average risk of
ovarian cancer should not be screened for the disease. The task force, 16
federally appointed experts, makes recommendations on which screening tests
work and which don’t. The American Cancer Society and the American Congress
of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have also discouraged the use of
screening tests for ovarian cancer in most women.

Such advice does not apply to women who have genetic mutations or a family
history that puts them at high risk or to women who have suspicious
symptoms, like persistent
bloating<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/abdominal-bloating/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
pelvic or abdominal
pain<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/abdominal-pain/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
symptoms that are not unique to ovarian cancer.

The task force relied heavily on a large
study<http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=900666>published
last year of 78,000 women ages 55 to 74, half of whom were
screened with ultrasounds and blood tests for a biological marker of
ovarian cancer, and half of whom were not. After following them for 11 to
13 years, the death rate from ovarian cancer was the same in both groups.
But nearly 10 percent of those screened, more than 3,200 women, had
false-positive results and more than 1,000 of them had surgery, usually to
remove one or both ovaries. Many of them had serious complications, such as
surgical injuries to other organs, infections and blood clots.

As Denise Grady pointed out in The
Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/health/research/ovarian-cancer-tests-are-ineffective-medical-panel-says.html>on
Tuesday, the problem with the tests is that the biological marker
being
measured (CA-125) can be elevated by conditions other than
cancer<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/cancer/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
the ultrasounds can reveal benign cysts that cannot be distinguished
from cancer without surgery to remove the ovary.

Despite the expert advice against routine screening, a
survey<http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1033343>of 1,000
doctors published in February found that a third of them believed
that screening was effective and many offered it to patients. Many patients
request screening, believing that it can find the disease early enough to
save lives. It is long past time for doctors and their patients to
recognize that this assumption is wrong.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120912/e91cc98c/attachment-0001.html>