Ovarian cancer screening: Current status and future directions

Abstract

Ovarian cancer is the third most common gynaecological malignancy and the most lethal worldwide. Most patients are diagnosed with advanced disease which carries significant mortality. Improvements in treatment have only resulted in modest increases in survival. This has driven efforts to reduce mortality through screening. Multimodal ovarian cancer screening using a longitudinal CA125 algorithm has resulted in diagnosis at an earlier stage, both in average and high risk women in two large UK trials. However, no randomised controlled trial has demonstrated a definitive mortality benefit. Extended follow up is underway in the largest trial to date, UKCTOCS to explore the delayed reduction in mortality that was noted. Meanwhile, screening is not currently recommended in the general population Some countries offer surveillance of high risk women. Novel screening modalities and longitudinal biomarker algorithms offer potential improvements to future screening strategies as does the development of better risk stratification tools.

Construction and Validation of a Novel Glycometabolism-Related Gene Signature Predicting Survival in Patients With Ovarian Cancer

“…In recent years, features such as age, pathological stage, lymph node metastasis and distant metastasis have been commonly used in clinical work to predict the prognosis of patients with OC (Mittermeyer et al, 2013;Yuan et al, 2017;Zwakman et al, 2017;Hua et al, 2019), but the accuracy of these factors is insufficient. With the development of high-throughput sequencing technology, an increasing number of mRNAs have been discovered as biomarkers that can be used to evaluate and predict the prognosis of OC (Buttarelli et al, 2020;Nash and Menon, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020). For instance, some scholars found that the high expression of TET3 was related to the progression of OC and the poor prognosis of patients (Cao et al, 2019).…”

“…With the development of high-throughput sequencing, several patient genome databases have been established, which have enabled us to gain a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of patients' genome changes. By mining databases, we identified a number of biomarkers associated with clinical outcomes (Buttarelli et al, 2020;Nash and Menon, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020). However, a single gene cannot accurately predict the outcomes of OC.…”

The Cancer Stem Cell Niche in Ovarian Cancer and Its Impact on Immune Surveillance

“…Owing to the success of cervical and breast cancer screening, as well as the rather modest increase in survival from improved treatment, there have been fervent efforts to boost ovarian cancer survival via screening using CA125, an epitope of MUC16, a large glycoprotein marker. However, the accuracy of this biomarker is still questionable, although more effective screening strategies with CA125 are being developed [4]. As outlined before, therapeutic advances have led to only a small increase in ovarian cancer survival rate over the years.…”

UBE2T is upregulated, predicts poor prognosis, and promotes cell proliferation and invasion via inhibiting autophagy in ovarian cancer

“…However, the actual rate of OC patients diagnosed at early stage is as low as 20%, indicating the most OC patients are diagnosed at advanced stages, which largely accounts for the unsatisfactory prognosis of OC patients [1,2]. Obviously, the unfavorable outcomes suggest the defects of the current biomarkers and treatments of OC and it is vital to explore novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, and therapeutic targets to improve the e ciency of diagnosis and treatment in OC.…”