A new study of OVA1 clinical performance has been released as an online advance publication of The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. It examines the relationship between two commonly used imaging methods—ultrasound (US) and computed tomography (CT)—and the OVA1 test result in assessing the risk of ovarian cancer among patients planning surgery for an ovarian mass. OVA1 is an FDA-cleared blood test that measures the levels of five proteins and then uses a proprietary algorithm and software called OvaCalc to calculate a single risk score.
“This new study advances our understanding of how OVA1 and imaging work together in the pre-surgical assessment of ovarian cancer risk,” says study co-author Fred Ueland, MD. “This is important for two reasons. First, adding OVA1 reduced the number of ovarian cancers missed with imaging alone, by 85% to 90%. Recent publications have reinforced that the first surgery is an important opportunity to improve ovarian cancer survival by ensuring that cancers are detected earlier and that they are operated on by the most experienced specialists. Second, this study provides new evidence of how menopausal status, imaging, and OVA1 score may interrelate.”
Study authors compared the performance of each imaging method alone to the performance of OVA1 alone (for risk stratification), as well as in combination with OVA1. In addition, the authors presented logistic regression models showing how menopausal status, high- or low-risk imaging, and OVA1 score interact in the assessment of ovarian cancer risk. The researchers concluded that “serum biomarkers and imaging are a complementary set of clinical tools and that when the [OVA1] score is further stratified by imaging risk and menopausal status, there is a better understanding of the clinical risk of ovarian malignancy.” Read the study abstract.
