Invasive cervical cancer in the 1990s.
The death rate from invasive cervical cancer has decreased by 70% since the classic work by Papanicolaou and Traut in 1941 on the use of cytologic evaluation to detect cancer of the uterine cervix in the preinvasive in situ stage--a nearly 100% curable disease. Unfortunately, the survival stage for stage of invasive cervical cancer has remained static over the nearly 5 decades since their report. However, discoveries in the decade of the 1970s of the natural spread of cervical cancer, not only to the known pelvic lymph nodes, but the increasing incidence of paraaortic lymph node metastasis with advanced stages, the higher dose of radiation required to sterilize pelvic lymph node metastasis discovered at the time of radical hysterectomy or for locally advanced cervical cancer treated solely by radiation therapy, and the use of radiation potentiators, such as hydroxyurea, should lead to the significant reduction in the annual 7,000 deaths from this disease in the decade of the 1990s.
Piver
M S
MS
Department of Gynecologic Oncology, Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Buffalo, NY 14263.
D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009361:Neoplasm Invasiveness; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D013997:Time Factors; D002583:Uterine Cervical Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology* / Q000628:therapy