Oncology

New Ovarian Cancer Treatment

There’s new hope for ovarian cancer patients. Doctors are saying that giving chemo through the abdomen rather than through the vein should now be the way many ovarian cancer patients are treated.

This is actually an old method to deliver chemo; it dates back fifty years. It delivers the chemo into what’s called the intra-peritoneal area of the abdomen.

The goal is to get the remaining cancer cells after the tumor is surgically removed, in patients like Eleanor Lewis. Eleanor is looking for a way to lessen the significance of time.

Four years ago, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It’s been an up and down ride since. “I went into remission after I had my first treatment in 2001, and everything was fine,” says Eleanor.

Intravenous chemotherapy did the trick for a time. But the cancer came back. “I went and got the cat scan and they saw the tumors,” Eleanor recalls.

But this time--now three years later--Eleanor opted for chemo delivered in a very different way, straight into the abdomen.

The technique is called intra-peritoneal chemotherapy. The concept is to bathe the cancer cells with a high dose for a very long period of time.

“The IP route delivers a whopping amount of platinum, that is the bottom line. And so you treat the location where the cancer cells are and the bottom line is you destroy more of them than with the intravenous route,” says Dr. Fanco Muggia, Director of the Division of Medical Oncology at NYU.

“I hope it works it should be a better chemo,” says Eleanor And at least according to new research in the latest New England Journal of Medicine, it is.

This study compared stage three ovarian cancer patients who got standard intravenous, or through the vein, chemo--to those getting intra-peritoneal chemo--in an attempt to remove left over cancer cells after the tumor had been surgically removed.

The results were relatively speaking, striking: a nearly 16 month improvement in overall survival. “You’re gaining in the most lethal aspect of ovarian cancer which is disease that comes back in the peritoneal cavity and leads to intestinal obstruction,” says Dr. Muggia.

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