What you should know about Gynecologic Cancers

Check out the following, “What you should know about Gynecologic Cancers courtesy of www.upthevolume.org

Gynecologic cancers are often called silent killers because many women are not diagnosed until the later stages of the disease when treatment is less effective.  In many cases early symptoms are not distinct and no reliable early screening test exists.

Gynecologic cancers refer to cancers that affect the female reproductive organs.  These include uterine, cervical, ovarian, fallopian tube, peritoneal, vagina, and vulva cancers. Approximately 77,000 women in the
U.S. are diagnosed with gynecologic cancers each year and about 28,000 will die from them.

Treatment of ovarian, fallopian tube and peritoneal cancers is dependent on the stage and grade of disease. For some patients with disease confined to the ovaries and no spread of disease, no further treatment is
required. Standard recommendations for other patients include surgical removal of any visible spread of the disease, followed by chemotherapy. Chemotherapy may be delivered intravenously or directly into the peritoneal cavity. Alternative treatment plans exist for women who may not be able to tolerate an aggressive surgery due to extensive spread of cancer or to the patient’s poor health.

Patients with Stage I or Stage II disease who undergo surgery and chemotherapy have great than an 80% chance for long-term survival. Unfortunately, 75-80% of women are diagnosed with Stage III or Stage IV disease. Only about 20% of patients with advanced disease can expect a long-term survival.

New cancer treatments are continually being developed and tested against standard therapies. In order for a new drug to become part of standard recommendations it must be proven to be superior to current standards through rigorous clinical trials. In addition to new therapies there are many unanswered controversies in the way Gynecologic Oncologists use known treatments.  These controversies result in treatment decisions that differ from one institution to another based on differences in physician training, philosophy, and beliefs but not on definitive evidence. Until these questions are definitively answered by large-scale clinical trials, women with gynecologic cancers will not be treated uniformly with best clinical practices and therapies.

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