Salvage therapy for recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer is diagnosed in approximately 23,300 women annually and results in 13,900 cancer-related deaths annually. Most women show an excellent response to initial treatment with chemotherapy, but most also develop recurrent disease and require additional therapy. Although therapy for recurrent ovarian cancer is rarely curative, women now live much longer with their disease. This situation has led to a shift in the perception of ovarian cancer from a quickly fatal disease to one that is more chronic in nature, requiring repeated rounds of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy studies conducted in the salvage setting typically involve relatively small numbers of younger patients whose disease shows good performance. The extrapolation of these observations to the practice setting, compounded by the clinical and molecular heterogeneity of epithelial ovarian cancer, further exacerbates the difficulties encountered in individual treatment recommendations.