Clinicopathologic factors associated with short-term survival in advanced epithelial ovarian cancer

A global broad scale study including 865,501 women from 61 countries recently reported that the 5-year survival rate for ovarian cancer was between 30% and 50%, and the survival trends were quite stable in most countries (1). Because epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) has almost no early onset of symptoms and its current screening is difficult to be performed in the general population, nearly 80% of EOC patients were diagnosed during the late stage of the disease (2). After advanced EOC patients underwent cytoreductive surgery combined with platinum-based chemotherapy, about 15% of them could obtain 10 years survival after the diagnosis (3-5). In contrast, still 20–30% of EOC patients who were diagnosed with the same disease and who underwent similar treatment had a survival rate not exceeding 2 years (6). Current clinical algorithms fail to distinguish these EOC patients from long-term survivors (LTS) at the time of diagnosis, and as a result, such patients and LTS are treated similarly. Hence, identifying the significant predictors of poor prognosis in EOC patients may lead to a development of more targeted therapeutic regimens and may improve the survival outcomes of EOC patients in the future