Currently, there is no generally accepted method of screening for ovarian cancer. John R. van Nagell, MD, and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Ky., used an ultrasound test called transvaginal sonography (TVS) to screen 14,469 women between 1987 and 1999. Women were eligible for screening if they were at least 50 years old or at least 30 and had a family history of ovarian cancer.

The annual test involved placing a small TVS probe into the vagina to give off sound waves, creating a picture of the ovaries that doctors examined for abnormalities. If an abnormality was seen, the test was repeated four to six weeks later. Of the women who were screened, 180 had consistently abnormal TVS test results and had surgery to examine and, in some cases, remove the abnormality. Although most of these 180 women had benign tumors or cysts, 17 had ovarian cancer.

The researchers reported 65 percent of the cancers found (11 of 17) were in the earliest stage (Stage I). Usually, only 25 percent of ovarian cancers are detected at Stage I.

Another three cancers were found at Stage II. All the Stage I and II patients, or 88 percent of those diagnosed with ovarian cancer, were alive at follow-up an average of four and a half years later. Only about half of all women typically survive ovarian cancer for five years or more.

But Robert Smith, PhD, director of cancer screening for the American Cancer Society (ACS), was more cautious. "While these findings are encouraging, they do not give us the definitive evidence we need to know that screening for ovarian cancer saves lives," he said. "If two women with ovarian cancer die on the same day, and one woman?s tumor was discovered three years earlier, with screening, she may have lived longer aware of her cancer, but not any longer than the woman whose cancer developed the same day but was undiscovered until symptoms brought her to her doctor with the disease in a later stage."