Abstract
Although ovarian and endometrial cancers are both gynecologic tumors with some shared risk factors, they have many differences that distinguish them. Ovarian cancer is a rare, silent killer with no single mechanism defining its etiology, while endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic cancer, has a high survival rate, and is generally attributable to excess estrogen. For each cancer, we describe the current population distributions and evaluate longitudinal trends and survival rates. The primary focus of this chapter is comparing and critically considering known and suspected risk factors for these two gynecologic tumors, with particular attention paid to implication for pathogenesis and future directions for discovery of improved diagnostics, precision treatments, and cancer prevention. For ovarian cancer, recent advances have focused on identification of subtypes that imply heterogeneous origins. A growing body of evidence suggests differential survival rates that are independent of stage at diagnosis and response to current treatment regimens. For endometrial cancer, robust risk factor establishment has led to deep understanding of the role of estrogens in benign, malignant, and metastatic tumor pathogenesis. Both gynecologic cancers reinforce the success of multidisciplinary approaches that require expertise from population- and clinical epidemiology, pathology, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics.
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Terry, K.L., Missmer, S.A. (2017). Epidemiology of Ovarian and Endometrial Cancers. In: Loda, M., Mucci, L., Mittelstadt, M., Van Hemelrijck, M., Cotter, M. (eds) Pathology and Epidemiology of Cancer. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-35153-7_13
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