Doctors are now advising more women to get their fallopian tubes removed in order to avoid ovarian cancer.
The Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance has released updated guidance, encouraging women who are done having children and who are already ‘undergoing a pelvic surgery’ for another condition to get their fallopian tubes removed as a protective measure against ovarian cancer.
‘As the fallopian tube is the origin of most high-grade serous cancers, fallopian tube removal has been shown to dramatically reduce risk for a later ovarian cancer diagnosis,’ the organization explained.
This came after a clinic trial performed by UKCTOCS found that unlike other forms of cancers, how early the disease is detected isn’t directly linked to its survival rate, DailyMail confirmed.
‘In addition to finding that screening average-risk women does not reduce ovarian cancer mortality, the trial revealed that in many women identifying their cancer at Stage I or Stage II did not impact their mortality,’ the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance revealed.
‘Detecting it at an earlier stage was not enough to prevent them from dying from the disease and did not prolong their lives.
The fallopian tubes are used to bring an egg from the ovaries to the uterus when a woman becomes pregnant.
‘It is clear that for early detection to dramatically improve outcomes, new yet undiscovered methods will need to be developed so the cancer can be discovered much earlier for those with the more aggressive ovarian cancer.’
According to the American Cancer Society, 19,710 women in the US are diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year, and 13,000 die from the disease annually.
Karen H. Lu – who is part of the department of gynecologic oncology and reproductive medicine at the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center – told Washington Post that this could be an effective way of preventing ovarian cancer, since most of the time, it starts in the fallopian tubes.
Rebecca Lynn Stone, a gynecologic oncology surgeon, echoed these sentiments to Hopkins Medicine explaining, ‘Salpingectomy lowers the risk of ovarian cancer in all people.
