Awareness of Ovarian Cancer Symptoms Ineffective in Down-staging Diagnosis

Despite greater public awareness on the symptoms common to ovarian cancer, Mary Anne Rossing, Ph.D., et al, found that only one in 100 women with the symptoms are likely to receive a diagnosis based on current knowledge.

Rossing et al assessed the sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value of the ovarian cancer symptoms contained in a consensus statement available at http://www.wcn.org/articles/types_of_cancer/ovarian/symptoms/concensus_statement.html in a Jan. 28, 2010, article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The team interviewed 812 women 35- to 74-years-old who received a diagnosis of ovarian cancer between 2002 and 2005, along with 1,313 population-based control subjects.

The authors considered the symptom index positive when participants reported pelvic or abdominal pain, bloating or a full feeling at least daily for a week, with an onset of less than a year before ovarian cancer was diagnosed. In addition, the positive predictive value of the symptoms were measured using external estimates of cancer prevalence.

“Most case patients who had a positive index or met consensus criteria did so only within five months before diagnosis,” concluded Rossing et al. “Symptoms (except nausea) were somewhat less likely to have occurred among women diagnosed with early-stage than late-stage ovarian cancer.”

The estimated positive predictive value of the symptom index or symptoms meeting the consensus criteria was a negligible 0.6 percent to 1.1 percent overall and less than 0.5 percent for early-stage disease, according to the authors.