New research delivers devastating findings about ovarian cancer screening

Four Australian women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer a day and three will eventually die from the disease. It’s usually diagnosed late, because few women show symptoms until they have advanced cancer.

As a junior doctor in London in the mid-1980s, Ian Jacobs saw women undergo chemo and exhaustive surgery, only to suffer and die from the disease. Detecting it early, he hypothesised, should save lives. So he and his colleagues set out on a decades-long research project to do just this.

But the final trial data, published in The Lancet, deliver a devastating blow to women who had hoped to access an early detection tool, and for the researchers involved.

Read Ian Jacobs’ piece in The Conversation.