SCREENING POLICIES FOR OVARIAN CANCER IN NIGERIAN HOSPITALS: A REVIEW

Ovarian Cancer is a problem battled worldwide and is typically diagnosed at an advanced stage due to the lack of effective screening strategies. An effective screening method should detect the disease at an earlier stage at diagnosis such that treatment would result in better outcome and not the inevitable mortality. Diagnosis of Ovarian cancer at an early stage (stage 1) could be a benefit of good screening strategies because it is associated with a high 5- year survival rate (95%) as it appears that globally, there is no early detection for this yet. In this article, we review the epidemiology, risk factors as well as the current state of screening tests for ovarian cancer in Nigeria.