‘We Expect to Put About 80% of Our Ovarian Cancer Patients into Remission’
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/ Updated July 30th, 2020

‘We Expect to Put About 80% of Our Ovarian Cancer Patients into Remission’

Medical Source: Dr. Peter Argenta
University of Minnesota Physicians
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Chemotherapy can put most ovarian cancer, even advanced stage, into remission.

  • The prognosis for ovarian cancer patients depends on the stage doctors find it when a patient is first assessed.
  • The chemotherapy drug carboplatin is effective for putting 80 percent of ovarian cancers, even more advanced disease, into remission.
  • Remission is not a cure; it means that there's no sign of disease in scans, blood work, or physical examinations.
Most women are diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, stage III or IV, because symptoms of the disease in its early stages tend to be vague and attributed to other causes. The more extensive the disease, the less likely a woman is to be cured.

The good news, says Dr. Peter Argenta, gynecologic oncologist at the University of Minnesota Health Cancer Care, is that "most people, even with advanced disease, can be put into remission with proper treatment. With carboplatin, we expect about 80 percent of patients to go into remission. What that means is that we can’t see the disease when we scan you, or find it when we check your blood, or feel it when we physically examine you."

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And if you think about it, that's the state that most of us live in. "If you ask me if I have cancer, I'd say no,” says Dr. Argenta. “But if you ask me, am I sure I don’t have cancer, I’d have to say I don’t know.

So when we take a patient from knowing she has cancer and convert them to someone who isn’t sure if she has cancer anymore, to me that is a big step forward."

With ovarian cancer, and most metastatic cancers, however, a tumor isn’t really gone. So while a patient may go months or years, or sometimes even decades, without showing signs of the disease, ultimately it does recur. According to Dr. Argenta, there are about 15 percent or so of people who, for whatever reason, don’t experience a cancer recurrenceincluding people who have advanced-stage disease and look incurable, but for whatever reason, they get their treatment once and never need treatment again.

"If you looked at them, you wouldn’t think they look different from the rest of us," Dr. Argenta says. It's the same for ovarian cancer patients after their chemotherapy: "Once their hair grows back and their energy comes back, they look and function as normally as anybody else."

Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.

Dr. Peter Argenta is a gynecologic oncologist with University of Minnesota Health. Read More

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