Ovarian cancer in children and adolescents: A rare disease that needs more attention. - PubMed - NCBI

abstract 

Highlights

• •Germ cell tumors are the most frequent type of ovarian cancer in children and have an excellent prognosis.
• •Epithelial ovarian cancer in children is very rare and therefore poorly studied. There is no specific treatment schedule and prognosis is clearly worse than for germ cell tumors.
• •Results from the literature are conflicting due to different classifications used and bias in reporting.
• •Collection of data nationwide and throughout Europe to improve our knowledge of this rare tumor type is recommended.

Abstract

Ovarian cancer is rare in childhood. This explains why there are only scattered reports on it in the literature and why there is a lack of specific pediatric treatment. This paper gives an overview of the Belgian data from 2004 to 2013 and reviews the literature. To index ovarian masses and malignancies in children better in the future, worldwide data collection should be improved and reproducible definitions of ‘childhood’, ‘malignancy’ and ‘ovarian mass’ need to be adopted.