Health Care

By: Trevor Price

If a woman is diagnosed with ovarian cancer during the early stages of the disease, her survival rates are excellent (75%) - that means it's critical to keep an eye on potential ovarian cancer warning signs.

A woman's chances of survival are strong if the ovarian cancer is caught early, but approximately 75% of women are diagnosed after it has already spread beyond the ovaries, and this is when survival rates drop to only around 20 or 30 percent.

To learn more about symptoms and signs of ovarian cancer that you should watch out for, read on.

Bloating

Constant and persistent bloating is often a clear indicator of ovarian cancer, especially if it's a significant change in a patient's bloating habits. So, if you've noticed an increase in how much and how often you're bloating, talk to you doctor.

Pelvic and Stomach Discomfort

Chronic pelvis and stomach pain along with constipation and digestion problems are more common in women diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Loss of Appetite and Decreased Weight

Like many cancer patients, one of the clearest ovarian cancer warning signs is a significantly decreased appetite, trouble eating and, subsequently, significant weight loss. Patients who often feel full after eating just a little bit of food or who have recently developed trouble eating should consult a doctor.

Urinary Problems

Urinary incontinence and a frequent or urgent need to urinate are both common symptoms of ovarian cancer. Patients often compare these symptoms and warning signs to a painless urinary tract infection (UTI). That is, the increased need to urinate but without the burning or pain during urination often associated with a UTI.

Fatigue and Pain

Unfortunately, the fatigue and back pain experienced by many patients with ovarian cancer is similar to pre-menstrual symptoms experienced by many women without the disease. The systems are generalized and not specific enough, but they can be helpful when diagnosing the problem.

One clear indicator is if the symptoms are persistent and almost daily rather than restricted to a specific period. However, other symptoms should be present before the patient is screened for cancer.

Genealogy

If you know that your family has a history of ovarian cancer, it's important to tell your doctor and be screened or evaluated on an ongoing basis. Essentially, if one immediate family member or two members of your extended family have been diagnosed with the disease, then it could be a clear warning sign and an indicator that you need to watch out for possible symptoms.

The good news is that even early stage ovarian cancer can produce many of these warning signs, and early detection often results in a stronger prognosis. So, watch your body, be aware of changes and don't be afraid to consult with your physician.

Given the cost and time associated with a medical visit, many people simply do not want to bother with an appointment and would rather assume that warning indicators of a potential problem are insignificant. This is a dangerous assumption, especially if you are experiencing multiple symptoms. Go ahead and schedule the visit just to be sure.

Research on two continents signaled more bad news for menopause hormones, offering the strongest evidence yet that they can raise the risk of breast cancer and are tied to a slightly higher risk of ovarian cancer.

New U.S. government numbers showed that breast cancer rates leveled off in 2004 after plunging in 2003 — the year after millions of women stopped taking hormones because a big study tied them to higher heart, stroke and breast cancer risks. Experts said the leveling off shows that the 2003 drop in the cancer rate was real and not a fluke.

From 2001 to 2004, breast cancer rates fell almost 9 percent — a dramatic decline, researchers report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The trend was even stronger for the most common form of the disease — tumors whose growth is fueled by hormones. Those rates fell almost 15 percent among women ages 50 to 69, the group most likely to have been on hormone pills.

At the same time, a study of nearly 1 million women in the United Kingdom showed that those who took hormones after menopause were 20 percent more likely to develop ovarian cancer or die from it than women who never took the pills. That study was published online by the London-based journal The Lancet.

For consumers, the new research doesn't change the advice to use the lowest dose for the shortest time possible for hot flashes and other menopause symptoms that can't otherwise be controlled.

For cautious scientists, the new breast cancer numbers were more evidence of the hormone-breast cancer link.

"The story has gotten stronger," said Dr. Peter Ravdin, a biostatistician at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who led the research.

Some were skeptical several months ago when Ravdin and National Cancer Institute researchers first reported the 2003 drop in the breast cancer rate. The new numbers, which add 2004, prove this was no fluke, said Dr. Julie Gralow, a spokeswoman for the American Society of Clinical Oncology and cancer expert at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"Because it didn't bump back up again," it supports the idea that the rate has stabilized at a new lower level, said Gralow, who had no role in the study.

Brenda Edwards, one of the journal authors who is a National Cancer Institute researcher, agreed. "Now we have a statistically significant decline" over three years and clear proof of a trend, she said.

Although some recent analyses suggest heart risks from menopause hormones are not as great as had been believed for younger, newly menopausal women, the statistics out this week add to the worries about cancer.

After rising steadily through the 1990s, the breast cancer rate dipped from 2001 to 2002, from 138 cases to 135 cases per 100,000 women. After the federal Women's Health Initiative study reported in July 2002 on the health risks of hormones, use of the pills plunged.

So did the breast cancer rate the following year — to 126 cases per 100,000 women. It was the steepest fall since the government started keeping records in the 1970s.

The drop was seen in all of the cancer statistics registries reviewed in the study, and no other cancer rate changed as dramatically — strong signs that hormones were playing a role, specialists said.

The 2004 rate held steady at about 126 cases per 100,000.

Stopping hormone use may have stopped some cancers from growing and caused them to disappear, scientists speculate. Or it may have just slowed them down so that they won't appear until years later, said Ahmedin Jemal, an American Cancer Society researcher. Only time will tell which is true, he said.

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which makes top-selling hormone pills Prempro and Premarin, criticized the study as overly speculative. Company spokesman Dr. Joseph Camardo said hormone prescriptions continued to fall in 2004 but breast cancer rates did not decline proportionately.

Ravdin said the company's criticism does not invalidate the cancer trends.

Breast cancer is the most common major cancer in American women and the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women. About 180,000 new cases are expected to occur in the United States this year and more than 1 million worldwide.

Ovarian cancer is far less common. The British study found that even with the 20 percent greater risk from hormones, the actual risk was very low: 2.6 of every 1,000 hormone users developed ovarian cancer over five years compared to 2.2 in 1,000 non-hormone users.

Still, that means about 1,000 extra ovarian cancer deaths from 1991 through 2005, said study leaders at the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit in Oxford.

Hormone use has declined already, and the new report should cause it to fall further, Dr. Steven Narod of the University of Toronto wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in The Lancet.

"We hope that the number of women dying of ovarian cancer will decline as well," he wrote.

Camardo, Wyeth's spokesman, said hormone labels already warn about an elevated risk of ovarian cancer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070419/ap_on_he_me/hormones_cancer_7