Many women with ovarian cancer complained of symptoms up to a year before diagnosis, but their doctors did not order the right tests for the fast-growing tumor until later, researchers said Monday.
Elderly women with ovarian cancer were at least twice as likely to visit a doctor and report symptoms such as abdominal swelling or pelvic pain, Dr. Lloyd Smith of the University of California at Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento and colleagues reported in Monday’s issue of the journal Cancer.
“Our findings suggest that ovarian cancer could be diagnosed earlier in some patients,” Smith said in a statement.
For their study they looked at the claims records of 1,985 elderly women with ovarian cancer, 6,024 elderly women with breast cancer, and 10,941 Medicare-enrolled women of the same age without cancer.
They compared diagnosis codes — which doctors write down when making insurance or Medicare claims — and claims for diagnostic procedures.
Fast-growing tumors
They found about 40 percent of the women had physician claims indicating one or more visits for abdominal or pelvic symptoms before their ovarian cancer was diagnosed.
While abdominal pain and swelling are not always symptoms of ovarian cancer, the disease is especially deadly because it usually is diagnosed after it has spread.
And it is a tumor that grows quickly, progressing from early to advanced stages in as little time as a year, so speedy diagnosis is key.
This year, more than 22,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer and more than 16,000 will die of it, according to the American Cancer Society, which publishes Cancer.
It can be diagnosed with pelvic imaging, or a blood test for a protein called CA-125, although neither of these tests will detect all cases of ovarian cancer.
The CA-125 test catches about half of early, Stage I ovarian cancers and is inadequate when used alone to diagnose early ovarian cancer. For patients with later, Stage II, III or IV disease, the test is 80 percent accurate in detecting cancer.
Another 20 percent of ovarian cancer patients never have increased CA-125.
Only 25 percent of the ovarian cancer patients had pelvic imaging or CA-125 tests between three years and four months before diagnosis, Smith’s team found.
