Molecular Epidemiology And Clinical Outcome In Epithelial Ovarian Cancers

在英国，每年有4000到5000名女性死于卵巢癌。它是致命性更强的癌症之一，因为当女性被诊断出患有这种疾病时，她存活5年以上的机会通常很低。这一统计数据在40年内变化很小。减少癌症造成的死亡的一种方法是在疾病发展的最早阶段发现疾病，那时它是最可治疗的。然而，早期卵巢癌的许多症状是模糊的，而且没有针对这些癌症的检测的国家筛查计划。如果我们能确定患癌症风险最大的人群比例，就可以使用有针对性的策略对这些女性进行筛查，并在癌症发展过程中发现任何早期迹象。一个人？S的基因构成会增加他们患糖尿病、心脏病和乳腺癌等多种常见病的几率。通过筛选显示人与人之间差异的数百万个DNA代码字母，有可能找到那些在某些疾病患者中似乎更常见的字母。这就是我们一直在为卵巢癌做的事情；将数千名患有这种疾病的女性和没有患病的女性的DNA密码进行比较。我们现在计划利用这一信息，找到几封似乎表明女性患卵巢癌风险最大的信件。我们还将测试她的生活方式中是否有一些因素--例如她是否有孩子，或者是否服用过口服避孕药--也会改变她患卵巢癌的风险。一旦我们做到了这一点，我们将能够测试是否可以使用我们发现的标记来筛查整个人群中的高风险女性。进行这些研究需要大量的国际努力，因为我们必须对数千名患有疾病的妇女和参与这些研究的志愿者进行筛查。为了进行这项研究，我们综合使用了来自世界各地的11项不同研究的力量。人们希望这些发现不仅能在英国产生影响，还能在卵巢癌也是主要健康问题的其他国家产生影响。

Ovarian cancer kills between 4 and 5,000 women a year in the UK. It is one of the more lethal cancers in that when a women is diagnosed with the disease, she usually has a low chance of surviving more than 5 years. This statistic has changed very little in 4 decades. One approach to reducing death caused by cancer is to detect the disease at its earliest stages of development, when it is most treatable. However, many of the symptoms of early stage ovarian cancer are vague and there is no national screening programme that targets the detection of these cancers. If we could identify the proportion of the population that is a greatest risk of getting the disease, one could use a targeted strategy to screen these women and find any early signs of cancer as it develops. A person?s genetic make-up can increase their chance of getting one of many common diseases including diabetes, heart disease and breast cancer. By screening several million letters of DNA code that show variation from person to person, it is possible to find those letters that appear to be more common in individuals with certain diseases. This is what we have been doing for ovarian cancer; comparing the DNA code of thousands of women with the disease to women without disease. We now plan to take this information and find the handful of letters that seem to suggest a woman is at greatest risk of getting ovarian cancer. We will also test whether there are factors in her lifestyle- for example whether or not she has had children, or used the oral contraceptive pill- that also changes her risk of getting ovarian cancer. Once we have done this, we will be able to test whether it is feasible to use the markers we find to screen for the highest risk women throughout the whole population. To do these studies requires a large international effort, because we have to screen several thousands of women with disease and volunteers that have taken part in these studies. We are using the combined power of 11 different studies from around the world in order to perform this research. It is hoped that the findings will not only have an impact in the UK, but in other countries where ovarian cancer is also a major health problem