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Texas doctors have tweaked an old procedure of combining surgery and chemotherapy with promising results to treat ovarian cancer, which disproportionately affects Latinas.
The altered strategy, which involves “assigning a score on the severity of the cancer to guide treatment,” has proven quite effective, and doctors have successfully removed 86% of the disease in treated patients over the last two years, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Despite the great success of this new approach, doctors haven’t yet proved this new strategy will extend lives, but they’re confident it will have a great impact.
“The idea was to take information that’s already known and implement it into practice so we could immediately have an impact on patient survival,” Alpa Nick, gynecological cancer specialist at the University of Texas MD Anderson, told the Wall Street Journal.
Ovarian cancer is one of the toughest cancers to treat and of the most difficult to diagnose. It often mimics other less serious symptoms and as a consequence it’s often discovered in later stages.
According to the CDC, Hispanic women are second to white non-Hispanic women at risk of ovarian cancer.
By The Numbers
25.1
percent
of Latinos remain without health insurance coverage
