New ovarian cancer screening technique shows benefits in UK study

A major UK study has demonstrated the potential benefits offered by a new screening method for ovarian cancer.

The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening, the world's largest ovarian cancer screening trial, is being led by University College London and involved 202,638 postmenopausal women aged 50 or over, who were randomly assigned to two different annual screening strategies.

With the new method, a statistical calculation is used to interpret changing levels in women’s blood of a protein called CA125, which is linked to ovarian cancer. This gives a more accurate prediction than the current method, which uses a fixed cut-off point for CA125.

It was shown that the new method detected cancer in 86 percent of women with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer, whereas the conventional test would have identified fewer than half of these cases.

Professor Usha Menon, co-principal investigator and trial co-ordinator at University College London, said: "We need to wait until later this year when the final analysis of the trial is completed to know whether the cancers detected through screening were caught early enough to save lives."

In the UK, around 7,100 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, making it the fifth most common cancer type in women.