The majority of women who are diagnosed with ovarian cancer will go into remission. However, around 80% of those women will have a recurrence within the next five years. How your doctors go about treating the recurrence will depend on how you were treated previously.
Recurrence often occurs because some cancer cells are left behind after treatment, and, over time, they grow larger. Your cancer may have specific features which means these cells just didn't respond well to treatment.
Read MoreIf a woman's time in between remission and recurrence is more than six months then the ovarian cancer is categorized as "platinum-sensitive" (that is, responsive to a platinum-based chemotherapy treatment) and that patient will be treated with chemotherapy and another platinum-based drug. However, if the recurrence time happens less than six months into remission, the ovarian cancer is classified as "platinum-resistant." At that point, women are usually treated with another type of chemotherapy and encouraged to enter into a clinical trial. Alternatively, women might be platinum refractory, which refers to disease that grows while the patient is on chemotherapy and has a particularly poor prognosis.
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