Members' Day 2005

Ovacome’s Chair Noeline Young welcomed everyone. The first speaker was Professor Ian Jacobs, Director of the Institute of Women’s Health at University College Hospital in London. Professor Jacobs’ talk was entitled Signs and Symptoms: finding evidence and moving forward. He informed the audience that a foolproof screening test would be found for ovarian cancer. He recognised that progress in this area for the majority of ovarian cancer patients seemed slow but emphasised that any screening test had to be 100 per cent foolproof before it is rolled out nationally.

The second speaker was Professor Mike Richards, the Department of Health’s Clinical Director for Cancer, who reports direct to the Health Minister. His talk, entitled Ovarian cancer – progress and challenges, covered facts and figures that showed amongst other things that five-year survival rates had increased. He also covered prevention and early detection, diagnosis, treatment, support and care and research. In summary, he said that progress had been made with ovarian cancer over the past 30 years but there is still a great deal to be done to prevent ovarian cancer and to improve outcomes for women who do develop the disease.

The final speaker of the morning was Dr Richard Osborne, a consultant oncologist at the Poole Hospital in Dorset. Dr Osborne’s talk was entitled Life on chemotherapy: managing the side effects. It covered the toxicity of chemotherapy and anaemia-induced by chemotherapy. He mentioned that side effects of chemotherapy were for the majority lessening, due to shorter duration of treatment and improved chemotherapy drugs. He also said that the use of some complementary and alternative medicine – particularly acupressure and ginger as anti-emetics – had also helped some people.