Key Challenges With Treating Frontline Ovarian Cancer

Dana Chase, MD of Arizona Oncology, discusses frontline treatment of ovarian cancer and the challenges faced in the community oncology setting.

Transcription:

0:08| The first situation is, you know, how does the woman present like her first visit your first encounter with her? How does she present with the disease, and what are her current challenges? So, there's definitely a type of woman that presents as a low-risk, advanced ovarian cancer versus a high-risk advanced ovarian cancer. We get pretty used to identifying these women when they come into clinic. There are factors like, do they have a fixed pelvic mass? Do they have multiple comorbidities? Do they have pleural effusions? What's their age? What's their family support?

0:50| So, a lot of this is taken into consideration, and that can present challenges to the different treatment options we have, like whether or not we decide to do surgery first, or decide to do chemotherapy first and do surgery later. That's one potential challenges at diagnosis, how do they present?

1:12 |The second potential challenge is, how do they tolerate treatment? Are they having a lot of toxicities? For patients who’ve had surgery, are they having wound issues if they had while they're getting treatment? Potentially they need dose reductions, or they need dose delays with their chemotherapy. Getting them through chemotherapy can sometimes be very challenging. Then once they're in remission, the challenge is who to figure out is a high risk for recurrence and when are they going to recur?

1:49 | The majority of patients, about 80%, do recur? To this date, we don't have a way of figuring out who's going to recur sooner versus later. We have some ideas but nothing's really concrete. This is potentially another challenge.