What Is Ovarian Cancer And When It Occurs
What is Ovarian Cancer? Ovarian Cancer is another type of cancer which they called as “the silent killer”, because, all of its symptoms were not thought to develop until such time that the disease had already been advanced and the chances for curing it is poor. It is a cancerous growth which occurs in the different parts of the woman’s ovary.
This disease is more common in industrialized nations with some exceptions like Japan. Ovarian Cancer has forms and its most common form is being formed from the epithelium or outer layer of the ovary, while its other forms are being arises in the egg cells, which is called germ cell tumor. The risk of having this disease increases most especially when women aged.
But on the other hand, women can avoid or even lessen the risk of having Ovarian Cancer, if they will engage in pregnancy, meaning the more children a woman would have, the lower risk she would have on acquiring this disease. Another thing is that, women can be protected from this disease if she will have her first pregnancy at a young age, have her last pregnancy on her older age, and lastly if she only uses low dosage of hormonal contraceptives.
Aside from those, Ovarian Cancer can be reduced in women after having tubal ligation. Last 2004, 25, 580 of women has been diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer and 16,090 of this group died because of it. More than half of Ovarian Cancer’s death occurs in women ages between 55-74 years old, and one quarter of it occurs in between 35-54 years of age.
Studies had shown that in a woman’s lifetime there is only 1.6% of possibility women could have Ovarian Cancer, but, for those who have first degree relatives who are already affected by this disease or even by a breast cancer already have a 5% or higher risk of acquiring it. Aside from that, women who have a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene have a very high risk on having a breast and Ovarian Cancer.
On the contrary it has also been shown that, if a woman uses oral contraceptives for 10 years she would have a 60% reduction of the risk having this disease. This is the largest epidemiological study that states how a woman could at least lessen her risk on having an Ovarian Cancer. Because by now, Ovarian Cancer is the fifth leading cause of death for women cancer and it is being considered as the leading cause of death from the gynecological cancer.
We can’t do anything to prevent our body from having this disease, most especially women with a strong family history of uterine cancer, colon cancer, or any other gastrointestinal cancer could be indicate to have the presence of the syndrome they called as the hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer/HNPCC, which is also known as lynch II syndrome, which may confer a higher risk in developing Ovarian Cancer in their system.
Now that we know what is Ovarian Cancer we should now check our family history and take good care of ourselves. As a woman we could simply visit our OB gynecologist as often as we could to have our check up. In this way we can have a simple prevention and keep ourselves healthy as we all wanted to be.
