While lymph node swelling is a common immune response to vaccination, many people have been concerned about how this occurrence could affect the results of their mammograms. Ovarian Cancer: The Silent Killer. These factors can increase your risk of developing ovarian cancer: Endometriosis Estrogen hormone replacement therapy after menopause Family history of ovarian cancer Having children later or never at all Inherited gene mutations BRCA1 or BRCA2 carriers Obesity Advanced age most common in women 50 to 60 years old Personal history of breast, uterine or colon cancer If you have any signs or symptoms that concern you, or if you have any factors that put you at a higher risk for developing ovarian cancer, talk to you doctor.
Innovative, minimally invasive technology at Inspira offers earlier, and more accurate lung cancer diagnoses. Read More. Ovarian Cancer Facts Ovarian cancer is the second most common type of female reproductive cancer; in fact, more women die from ovarian cancer than from cervical and uterine cancer combined.
Ovarian cancer generally presents at more advanced stages, has higher rates of reoccurrence, and poorer survival rates than other cancers. There is no clear cause, but certain factors can increase risk of a woman developing ovarian cancer. Once symptoms are present, the cancer is typically more advanced, making treatment more difficult. Women need to be counseled routinely on the signs and symptoms of ovarian cancer; hopefully leading to early detection and treatment!
Perhaps this silent killer can become more of a whisper! The first surveyed primary care physicians and achieved a response rate of just over one half. Only 62 per cent identified the use of fertility drugs as a potential risk factor, however, and 71 per cent identified a previous history of breast cancer. Radner revealed that she unknowingly had most of the risk factors for ovarian cancer, including a strong family history and the use of fertility drugs.
Many women who were not in the public eye were also motivated to publicize their experiences, whether in books, newspaper articles, or online. By the turn of the century, ovarian cancer patients by the hundreds were telling their stories on the internet where, as for many diseases, websites were being created which provided ordinary people with a forum for sharing their perspectives on the experience of cancer. On these sites, entries could be very brief and still serve some of the same purposes as other cancer narratives.
Ovarian cancer narratives are both similar to and different from most other types of cancer stories. All such accounts are necessarily retrospective; they look back, after a diagnosis has been made, to the symptoms which preceded it and the false starts which were made in identifying the disease. One such story was that of Ayala Miron, the editor of a book titled Ovarian cancer journeys.
She was diagnosed in after several years of reporting symptoms to her doctors and two trips to the emergency ward, where she was diagnosed with a gallbladder attack on the first visit and diverticulitis on the second. After my ovarian cancer diagnosis, I realized that this disease caused the symptoms I felt.
My symptoms, over a number of years, taught me differently. The Johns Hopkins Pathology Ovarian Cancer Website provided a forum for women to write about their personal experiences with ovarian cancer in the early twenty-first century, and it became a particularly rich source of patient perceptions regarding the process of diagnosis.
Stories of long delay were legion, and a repeated theme was that both physicians and patients must be made aware of the symptoms which may signal ovarian cancer. No one even mentioned that my symptoms might have been ovarian cancer and my life threatened by it. I hate it. The prophylactic removal of healthy ovaries when hysterectomies were performed was still common, and one way to counter that practice was to downplay the danger of ovarian cancer.
By the late s, a growing body of research was providing more and more evidence that there was, indeed, a pattern of early warning signs of ovarian cancer which should be more widely publicized and acted upon. The growing ovarian cancer movement, meanwhile, lobbied for further research initiatives, and, on occasion, worked with members of the research community to document ovarian cancer symptom patterns.
One leading activist was Cindy Melancon, a registered nurse living in Amarillo, Texas, who was diagnosed in and started a newsletter, Conversations , as a forum for women with ovarian cancer and as a vehicle for disseminating information.
As Goff described the meeting:. Cindy and other survivors challenged the notion that ovarian cancer is a silent disease. During medical school, residency, and even gynecologic oncology fellowship I had been taught that ovarian cancer was a silent disease and so initially I was not optimistic that our studies would yield new information.
Although a number of researchers were already challenging the language long used to describe ovarian cancer, the findings of Goff and her colleagues would eventually prove to be a turning point. By tabulating symptoms experienced during the past year by women about to undergo surgery for a pelvic mass compared with two control groups attending primary care clinics, the team found that, while women commonly reported at least one of the symptoms associated with ovarian cancer, those eventually diagnosed with the disease had much more severe, frequent and varied symptoms, even compared with women suffering from IBS.
If the ultrasound detected a mass and the blood test revealed an elevation of a tumour marker that is common with ovarian cancer, the patient should be referred to a specialist in gynaecologic cancers. But I would not expect that to occur in the vast majority of cases. It has attempted to show that, while the use of metaphorical language in medical discourse is inevitable, metaphors arise within particular contexts and may outlive their utility in expressing medical realities.
These factors also supported its exclusion from public information campaigns and popular medical literature aimed at women readers. From mid-century onwards, a small number of physicians openly questioned the accuracy of this metaphor and the medical assumptions which it signified, but only during recent years were the existence of early symptoms and their possible role in diagnosis widely and publicly addressed in both the lay and medical press.
I thank Rob Gray for bringing this work to my attention. Make an appointment to discuss this further with your GP. Ovarian Cancer. Ovarian Cancer is a silent killer, which is often not diagnosed until it is well advanced. If women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer in Australia today, only about 46 of them will be alive after 5 years.
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