Cancer research groups and industry leaders are trying to raise awareness of a surgery that could reduce patients’ ovarian cancer risk by almost 80% — fallopian tube removal.
While evidence of the surgery’s nearly 80% risk reduction was published Feb. 2 in JAMA Network Open, some oncologists are concerned that awareness of the prevention strategy has not broken through to clinical care, according to a July 28 report from The New York Times.
Nearly all fatal ovarian cancer tumors start as “microscopic specks of cancer cells” that spill from the fallopian tube to the ovary, where they spread and grow, the report said. The cells do not show up on imaging, making early diagnosis unlikely. Fallopian tube removal — a five-minute procedure that can be performed during most abdominal surgeries — can prevent those cells from spreading.
“How do you take a critical discovery, one of the most critical discoveries in my lifetime, and move it to standard of care?” Rebecca Stone, MD, director of the Kelly Gynecologic Oncology Service at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine, told the Times.
The American Cancer Society, the American College of Surgeons and the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology have encouraged physicians to offer fallopian tube removal at the time of other abdominal surgeries.
The American Cancer Society told the Times it is working on a national campaign to raise awareness that the procedure can prevent most ovarian cancers. The organization is also working with Break Through Cancer and researchers from New York City-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Houston-based University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins Medicine to study offering patients a chance to learn about fallopian tube removal prior to certain abdominal surgeries, the report said.
Read the full report from the Times here.
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