Dr John Schorge on Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Treatment in Advanced Ovarian Cancer

John Schorge, MD, associate editor of The Green Journal, and Gynecologic Oncologist at Tufts Medical Center, discusses the findings of his study on neoadjuvant chemotherapy treatment of patients with advanced ovarian cancer.

Transcript

What were the findings of your study that investigated the delivery of neoadjuvant chemotherapy to women with advanced ovarian cancer?

One of the conundrums and controversies in the field is people that present with ovarian cancer— two-thirds of the time it's fairly advanced. Whether to start with surgery first or chemotherapy first has been the dilemma.

Historically, people have started with surgery first, and yet over the last decade or so there's been a lot more evidence that starting with chemotherapy— such as neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which means chemo first– seems to work out just as well in the long run in many cases.

Part of our work was looking at that trend and then determining that as an interval operation— which means halfway through the chemotherapy– if you're able to do a minimally invasive operation, like a standard laparoscopy, people have similar outcomes to open surgery, and a lot fewer side effects and a lot less complication risk.