VIDEO: Treatment options for endometrial cancer

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify iwaters@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Fortunately, the majority of women with endometrial cancer will present with early stage disease where a hysterectomy is curative. About 80% of women will present with uterine confined disease. Typically, surgery would be a hysterectomy. For postmenopausal women, we would usually recommend removal of the uterus, cervix, tubes, and ovaries, and sentinel assessment of the pelvic lymph nodes. For premenopausal women, if they have uterine confined disease, we can often preserve the ovaries. And so it's not necessarily true that women will need to go into surgical menopause if they have a very early endometrial cancer.

One of the developments in the last few years has been for premenopausal women who desire future fertility, we have had a lot more data coming out about fertility sparing options for endometrial cancer that normally consists of high dose progestin therapy, and in about 80% of cases, that will be successful in resolving the cancer, at least in the short term, allowing women to achieve a pregnancy. Now, it's important to realize that that's not definitive therapy, that the chances of recurrence are still very high. So we do recommend definitive surgery once childbearing is complete, but it has allowed a lot of women who are still in the reproductive years and not completed their families to do so before having a hysterectomy.