What is recurrent ovarian cancer?
70-80% of patients are initially diagnosed with advanced disease, i.e. disease that has spread outside of the ovaries. Obviously, one of the many things that scientists are working on today is trying to find ways to diagnose patients when their disease is still localized to the ovaries, so that their disease can be cured by surgical removal of the ovaries or diagnosed before the cancer develops. For the vast majority of ovarian cancer patients, the initial approach to treatment is surgery. This is unique for ovarian cancer; for most other cancers that have spread beyond the site of origin, we don’t do extensive surgery. However, for ovarian cancer we know from a large number of studies throughout the last two decades that patients who have an aggressive, up-front surgery do better. We’re going to be talking about that, because that’s one of the controversial issues in recurrent disease, whether there’s a benefit to surgery. After surgery, standard care in the US involves administration
