How does treatment of ovarian cancer differ between younger and older women?
Submitted by Setsuko Chambers, MD Response by Carol Howe, MD, MLS Although epithelial ovarian cancer is primarily a disease of post menopausal women and “sixty-one percent of new cancer cases occur in women >65 years of age,” (Villella & Chalas, 2005) women in this age group are dramatically underrepresented in the clinical trials upon which their treatment is based. Villella and Chalas (2005) discuss the many obstacles preventing enrollment of older women in clinical trials-which essentially contributes to the Catch-22 that prevents them from receiving the same aggressive treatment (surgical and chemotherapeutic) as younger patients because there are not enough standardized prospective randomly controlled trials proving that the benefit of such treatments outweigh the risks. The reasons for age-related biases that have precluded enrolment of this population in clinical trials are complex. Some clinical trials require that only patients without a history of prior malignancies be enroll
