According to an abstract to be reported at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, obesity plays little to no role in recurrence rates, time to recurrence, or progression-free survival in women with epithelial ovarian cancer following surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy without evidence of disease during treatment.
The researchers, from Mercy Medical center in Baltimore, define "recurrence" in this case as 'a positive radiological or pathological diagnosis of cancer after the patient had surgery, received adjuvant chemotherapy, and did not have any clinical, radiological, or serological evidence of recurrence during treatment.'
This study, a retrospective chart review of 370 patients diagnosed between 2004 and 2009 at either Mercy Med or the U of Michigan Med Center in Ann Arbor, found 35 percent of the women to be obese, and that among them and the remaining 65 percent, recurrence occurred after a relatively equal amount of time.
They conclude that obesity has little to no impact on recurrence rates, time to recurrence, or progression-free survival among this patient population. This conclusion will be added to the mixed bag of conclusions regarding obesity and ovarian cancers that have been reached by other studies from the past several years.
Typically, obesity is considered a major risk factor for all cancers, but that hasn't necessarily been directly borne out by studies involving ovarian cancer, especially as it relates to overall epithelial ovarian cancer risk, or progression-free survival in those patients following cytoreductive surgery.
Thus far, obesity has only been substantially associated with an increased risk of developing the subtype endometrioid ovarian cancer.
Source: ASCO 2012
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