OCRA

There are few clinical intervention strategies that are effective at either detecting epithelial ovarian cancer at the earliest most treatable stages, or chemo preventive strategies to reduce the burden of disease mortality. Signs and symptoms of early stage ovarian cancer are usually absent, and even when they are present in patients with late stage disease, symptoms are often subtle and may vary by ovarian cancer histotype. There are currently no effective screening approaches for detecting early stage EOC. Serum CA-125 testing is useful for differential disease diagnosis, but has not been shown to be an effective early-stage screening approach due to its low sensitivity and specificity. HE4 is another candidate ovarian cancer screening marker, although it has not been extensively tested in clinical trials. Vaginal ultrasonography can detect adnexal masses consistent with ovarian cancer, but once again this does not appear to be effective for detecting early stage ovarian cancer.