The study found that a simple ultrasound can reveal signs that a woman is at risk for ovarian cancer, potentially avoiding unnecessary surgery to treat the deadly cancer.
Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York have found that ultrasound can determine whether an ovarian lesion is benign or may eventually become cancerous.
This way, they can more accurately determine which women need surgery to repair or remove these lesions, preventing the development of deadly cancer.
Ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest cancers for women, with more than half of cases ending in death and 13,000 Americans dying from it every year.
Researchers have found that a simple ultrasound can determine whether an ovarian lesion is benign or malignant, saving women the stress of further diagnostic testing (file photo)
The researchers, who published their findings Tuesday in the journal Radiology, collected data from 1,205 women who were examined and found to be abnormal.
Of this group, 878 women with 970 ovarian lesions in between participated in the study. None of the participants had elevated risk factors for the disease.
Lesions are small tissue formations that can appear on different parts of the body. They can be either benign or malignant, which means they have a cancerous growth.
The vast majority of lesions are “classic” lesions that carry little risk of cancer, while “non-classic” lesions, which usually have detectable blood flow, carry risks.
“If you have something that matches the classic imaging regimens described for these lesions, then the cancer risk is really low,” Dr. Akshya Gupta, lead author of the study from the University of Rochester, said in a statement.
“If you have something that is non-classical in appearance, then having hard components and especially having Doppler blood flow is what really increases the risk of malignancy.”
The ultrasounds in the study could identify the lesions and determine with 92% accuracy whether they were malignant.
Only 53 of 970 lesions were found to be malignant, or six percent. Ultrasound was able to detect them with 93 percent accuracy.
One percent of the lesions identified by ultrasound as “classic” lesions were found to be malignant.
Usually, when a lesion is discovered, a woman needs to visit a doctor to determine if it is cancerous, and sometimes even surgery is required to remove the lesion before it develops into something more dangerous.
It can be an unsettling experience for women too, knowing that they will most likely be fine, but there is still a small chance of developing fatal cancer.
Finding benign and malignant lesions with ultrasound can shorten what can be a long and intimidating process for many women.
“Based on the characteristics we see on the ultrasound, we are trying to assess whether the finding needs further processing and which direction the patient should go,” Gupta said.
Ovarian cancer can be a potentially devastating diagnosis for women too. Only about half of women diagnosed with this diagnosis live more than five years.
According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), one in 78 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and one in every 104 will die from it.
Just under 20,000 women are diagnosed each year, and about 13,000 people die from it each year, according to the ACS.
One reason for its particularly low survival compared to other types of cancer is how late many women actually realize they have it.
Many women begin to experience symptoms of cancer and attribute it to bloating or other bowel problems.
Women often only bring a problem to the doctor after it has reached the point where it is causing serious pain, by which time it has usually gone far enough in the process to cause legitimate harm to the woman.