Abstract
Ovarian cancer is most lethal of all the gynecologic malignancies and the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths in women overall, accounting for about 5% of female cancer deaths. To improve the outcomes, an efficient screening tool for early detection of the disease at an earlier, curable stage would be required. Since the vast majority of ovarian cancer cases are sporadic in nature with relatively low incidence, a screening test has to offer very high specificity to avoid unnecessary interventions in false-positive cases to be considered suitable for general population use. Another approach to screening would entail increasing the pretest likelihood by focusing on patients at increased risk only. Several larger scale, randomized controlled trials are working on establishing screening strategies for the general population with the most promising results so far shown by the United Kingdom Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS), which revealed improvement in survival rates and reduction in mortality within screened patients. However, more data is required to establish the benefits, warranting further validation. Currently, research is ongoing on OC screening benefits and developing a suitable algorithm in order to have better patient outcomes. In this review article, we discuss current updates on OC screening strategies with special focus on novel development in biomarkers and sonography, as screening tools.