The Incidence of Ovarian Involvement in Endometrioid Endometrial Adenocarcinoma: A Retrospective Analysis

Background & Objective: Endometrial carcinoma is the most common malignancy of the female genital tract, which most often affects postmenopausal women. The ovaries may be active when a patient has endometrial cancer, so removing an ovary can worsen a patient's quality of life. On the other hand, a complete surgical staging in endometrial cancer includes oophorectomy since 1988. There has been some research to assess whether an oophorectomy should be performed and in which cases, ovaries can be preserved. Materials & Methods: Aim of this study was to evaluate the coexistence of ovarian involvement in endometrioid endometrial carcinoma. In this study, we evaluated 180 patients with endometrioid endometrial cancer patients who were surgically staged at Imam Hossein Hospital between 2004 and 2017. Results: Mean age of subjects of the study was 56.78 ±10.59. Forty-six of patients (25.6 %) were less than 50 years old and 74.4 % (134) were older than 50. Twenty out of 180 (11.1 %) of them had ovarian involvement (one of them had simultaneous ovarian tumor) and 11 (55%) of these cases were less than 50 years old. In 55 % (11) patients, the involved ovaries were less than 5 cm with grossly normal appearance, lymph nodes metastases were detected in 3 out of 20 (15 %) of them although their ovarian size were 4, 4.5 and 6.5 cm. In 10 (50 %) of them, deep myometrial invasion was detected. Conclusion: In endometrial cancer staging, ovarian preservation could be a challenging decision and a real controversy which needs more researches.