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Ovarian Cancer in Elderly Patients pp 79–93Cite as

How to Design Clinical Trials?

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Abstract

Ovarian cancer (OC) is the leading cause of mortality among patients with gynecologic malignancies (Boyle 1992). More than half of all OC occurs in women older than 65 (Jemal A, Murray T, Samuels A, Ghafoor A, Ward E, Thun MJ. Cancer statistics, 2003. CA Cancer J Clin. 2003;53:5–26; Mcgonigle KF, Lagasse LD, Karlan BY. Ovarian, uterine, and cervical cancer in the elderly woman. Clin Geriatr Med. 1993;9:115–30). The vast majority of women with ovarian cancer present with advanced stages, and curative treatment requires both aggressive surgery and chemotherapy. This approach has resulted in an improvement of the survival rates in the general population over the last decades with a median survival exceeding 50 months in most published series; the improvement is not present in the elderly population (Bristow RE, Tomacruz RS, Armstrong DK, Trimble EL, Montz FJ. Survival effect of maximal cytoreductive surgery for advanced ovarian carcinoma during the platinum era: a meta-analysis. J Clin Oncol. 2002;20: 1248–59; Chi DS, Eisenhauer EL, Zivanovic O, et al. Improved progression-free and overall survival in advanced ovarian cancer as a result of a change in surgical paradigm. Gynecol Oncol. 2009;114:26–31).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento Uro-Ginecologico, Istituto Nazionale Tumori “Fondazione G Pascale” – IRCCS, Naples, Italy

    Sandro Pignata, Sabrina Chiara Cecere & Rosa Tambaro

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  1. Sandro Pignata
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Correspondence to Sandro Pignata .

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  1. HCL Cancer Institute, Medical Oncology, and Université de Lyon , Lyon, France

    Gilles Freyer

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Pignata, S., Cecere, S.C., Tambaro, R. (2016). How to Design Clinical Trials?. In: Freyer, G. (eds) Ovarian Cancer in Elderly Patients. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23588-2_8

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