Final results of the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening | Target Ovarian Cancer

In the news
 

Posted by Target Ovarian Cancer on Thursday 17 December 2015

 

The world’s largest research trial of its kind has today reported its final results, raising the prospect of a UK ovarian cancer screening programme at some point in the future. The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) was coordinated by University College London and involved 200,000 women, 13 test centres throughout the UK and ran over 15 years......

In May 2015 the team released preliminary results about the performance of a new personalised CA125 blood test called ROCA which was used in one of the screening arms, although crucially this announcement did not address whether screening saved lives.
The UKCTOCS trial was only for women without symptoms of ovarian cancer and not at high risk of developing the disease due to a strong family history of either breast or ovarian cancer. Additionally, the trial was not assessing whether screening can be used to detect relapse in women who have already had ovarian cancer.
The final details of the trial were today published in The Lancet. Researchers say that the personalised blood test may help reduce the number of women dying from the disease by around 20 per cent, but stopped short of recommending that a screening programme for ovarian cancer would save lives. Not only was there not enough confidence that a screening programme would definitely impact mortality, but there are possible concerns around the number of women who would face unnecessary surgery or harm from surgical complications, which would need to be explored further......