Use of anti-thrombotic agents during chemotherapy for epithelial ovarian cancer

The association between malignancy and venous thrombotic events is well established. However, arterial thrombosis among cancer patients is extremely rarely reported. There are several mechanisms of arterial thrombosis or embolism in malignancy. Important mechanisms in arterial thrombogenesis are shear stress-induced platelet aggregation and platelet-derived microparticles. Both of these are induced by major abdominal surgery. A major abdominopelvic surgery followed by adjuvant platinum-based combined chemotherapy is routinely performed for epithelial ovarian cancer which is the leading cause of death among all gynecologic malignancies. These patients have a greater risk of arterial thrombosis at the postoperative period. If the affected arteries are relatively larger, clinical findings will be evident due to limb ischemia or fatal organ infarctions. However, thrombosis of the small arteries disturbs the tissue circulation which is extremely important for the chemotherapeutic agents to reach the residual tumor cells. When the thrombosis of small arteries is prevented, these drugs will reach all of the residual macroscopic or microscopic tumoral tissues and so the prognosis of the patients may be improved. Therefore, we hypothesize that anti-platelet therapy with aspirin is needed to be initiated during the postoperative period of epithelial ovarian cancer patients and be continued as tong as chemotherapy goes on. Such an approach might have a role in optimizing the oncological prognosis of these patients via increasing the effectiveness of cytotoxic therapy since some of the recurrences may be caused by some microscopic tumor foci which were not affected by cytotoxic drugs because of subclinical small arterial thromboses. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.