Tests commonly recommended to screen healthy women for ovarian cancer do more harm than good and should not be performed, a panel of medical experts said Monday.
The screenings — blood tests for a substance linked to cancer, and ultrasound scans to examine the ovaries — do not lower the death rate from the disease, and yield many false-positive results that lead to unnecessary operations with high complication rates, the panel said.
“There is no existing method of screening for ovarian cancer that is effective in reducing deaths,” Dr. Virginia Moyer, chairwoman of the expert panel, said in a statement from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. “In fact, a high percentage of women who undergo screening experience false-positive test results and consequently may be subjected to unnecessary harms, such as major surgery.”
The advice against testing applies only to healthy women with an average risk of ovarian cancer, not to those with suspicious symptoms and not to women at high risk because they carry certain genetic mutations or have a family history of the disease.
The recommendations are just the latest in a series of challenges to cancer screening issued by the group, which has also rejected PSA screening for prostate cancer in men and routine mammograms in women younger than 50. The task force is 16 experts, appointed by the government but independent, that makes recommendations about screening tests and other efforts to prevent disease.
