Women Underestimating Ovarian Cancer Risks
Experts say there needs to be a greater understanding of the symptoms of ovarian cancer as people are underestimating how many women it affects.
Lives are being put at risk by people's misunderstanding of ovarian cancer.
That's according to experts who say many underestimate the number of women who are affected by the disease.
New research from Target Ovarian Cancer shows more than a quarter of people believe fewer than 100 women die from ovarian cancer each month but more than 350 lose their lives to the disease each month.
In Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire alone, around 250 people are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year and up to 150 lose their lives on average.
More than three quarters of women also say they are not confident in spotting the symptoms of ovarian cancer – and more than one in four incorrectly believe cervical screening will detect ovarian cancer.
Lynne Holmes, a nurse specialist at Cottingham's Castle Hill Hospital, explains the signs and symptoms people should be looking out for:
"Persistent and new symptoms such as abdominal bloating, lower abdominal pain from below your belly button into your pelvis, wanting to pass urine more often, indigestion or feeling full. If you've got abdominal bloating, with ovarian cancer your tummy will bloat but it will stay bloated."
Lynne says many women wrongly think that cervical screenings would detect the disease:
"Lots of ladies think that when they have their smear tests, that they are looking for all ladies cancers, but that's not the case. A cervical smear is for picking up abnormal cells within the cervix and ovarian cancer is not picked up in this way. At the moment there is no appropriate screening to be able to pick up ovarian cancer, what we are looking for is not something that is pre-cancerous it's actually something that has become a cancer."
She says women must not feel embarassed to go get checked out:
"With all of our gynecological cancers often things will be ignored because it's too embarassing to go to the doctors. It does affect young women, we have ladies in their 20s, 30s and 40s coming through with ovarian cancer but the treatments have progressed massively over the last ten to fifteen years and so we are getting some really good responses to treatment and some reall good long-term survival."
For more information, visit:* *www.targetovariancancer.org.uk