High Risk Factors In Epithelial Ovarian Cancer, A Case-Control Study

The importance of three major gynecologic malignancies,i.e.cervi-cal cancer,endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer,has been changed due to the progress in treatment,prevention and etiologic research in the recent years.A reduction of incidence and an increase of cure rate has been achieved in cervical cancer.At the same time,the incidence of ovarian cancer keeps rising with no meaningful breakthrough in the therapeutic modalities.For this reason,the ovarian cancer has become the most fatal disease in gynecologic malignancies,especially in western countries.In the United States,for example,1.4x o(?) one of every 70 newborn girls are destined to develop ovarian cancer during their lives and around 12,000 women will die of this disease each year. The same changing pattern is also observed in our country.According to a prospective study conducted in Jiangsu Province from 1979 to 1981, ovarian cancer was found in 442 or 11.3x in a total of 3901 cases of gynecologic malignancies and ranked next only to the cervical cancer in the frequency of occurrence.An investigation carried out in Beijing also revealed that ovarian cancer was the second leading cause of death due to gynecologic cancers in the year of 1985.Therefore,the search for better preventive and therapeutic measures for this deadly disease has become a heat topic among gynecologists and oncologist. The epidemiologic methods have been used in detecting and exploring etiologic factors in patients with ovarian cancer for nearly 20 years in the western countries,while the research in this field is still at its preliminary stage in our country and only a few papers appeared in the literature.This is a report based on an epidemiologic case-control study carried out in the Metropolitan...