Treating Late-Stage Ovarian Cancer with Heat

The results lead the researchers to conclude that for patients with stage III epithelial ovarian cancer, added HIPEC treatment was superior in terms of recurrence free survival and overall survival rates. “Primary cytoreductive surgery for certain patients with ovarian cancer remains the preferred approach over neoadjuvant treatment, and administration of HIPEC at the time of interval cytoreductive surgery does not change that,” wrote David R. Spriggs and Oliver Zivanovic, both serving with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “New confirmatory clinical investigations of HIPEC are needed to clarify some of the unanswered questions before HIPEC can become a common treatment strategy. These considerations will be important for clinical trial investigators as they focus on the positive effect of HIPEC as an intervention as compared with the effects of promising new agent combinations or immunotherapy treatments,” they concluded.