Optimizing Outcomes in Endometrial Cancer: From Surgery to Recurrence Management

ReachMD Announcer:
You’re listening to Advances in Women’s Health on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Ann Klopp, who’s a Professor of Radiation Oncology, the Director of Brachytherapy, and the leader of the gynecologic section in the Department of Radiation Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. She’ll be discussing advances and challenges in treating patients with pelvic recurrences of endometrial cancer.

Here’s Dr. Klopp now.

Dr. Klopp:
The treatment for endometrial cancer depends a lot on the findings that typically come from having surgery first. There have been a variety of changes in the treatment paradigm. I think the most exciting one in the last couple of years has been the finding that adding immunotherapy to adjuvant treatment and to treatment for patients with advanced disease markedly improves outcomes, and so that’s been very exciting.

There’s still a lot of questions remaining about who needs exactly which regimen and how to optimize that further, but it was a very exciting development to see that marked improvement in survival for women with advanced endometrial cancer.

What happens to a significant minority of women who have surgery for endometrial cancer is that it can come back in the area that the original tumor site was, and typically, that is the top of the vagina and sometimes the lymph nodes as well. And so this a pretty specific scenario where somebody’s developed a recurrence of endometrial cancer, and specifically, it’s within the pelvis.We have to identify those in this special population of patients, which in some cases can get wrapped into the broader picture of recurrent endometrial cancers. And so I think that’s one really important message for the community just to be very aware that pelvic recurrences of endometrial cancer are a distinct patient population that will need distinct studies and definitely need consideration.

ReachMD Announcer:
That was Dr. Ann Klopp talking about key therapeutic developments and challenges in patients with pelvic recurrences of endometrial cancer To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Advances in Women’s Health on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!