If you don’t have any symptoms, and you don’t have a high risk hereditary cancer syndrome, then the current recommendations are that you shouldn’t get screened for ovarian cancer – the screenings aren’t reliable enough, and might do more harm than good. However, if you do have a high risk of ovarian cancer due to an inherited genetic syndrome then screening might well be a good idea, although it hasn’t been proven that this would lower your chances of dying from ovarian cancer.
But as Dr Jose Alejandro Rauh-Hain from the MD Anderson Cancer Center says, your best chance of catching the cancer early is to go to your physician with any symptoms immediately. These symptoms include bloating, abdominal pain and changes in bowel habits. But don’t be backward about coming forward. “It’s very important the patients are not afraid to ask questions to their physicians,’ Dr Rauh-Hain says. “It’s important that they not be afraid of asking those questions, because the sooner we can diagnose the cancer, the better the prognosis.”
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