Survival in epithelial ovarian cancer patients with prior breast cancer

Ovarian cancer patients who carry germ-line BRCA1 mutations may have improv ed survival compared with ovarian cancer patients without these mutations. To evaluate this hypothesis, the authors compared survival in ovarian cance r patients who had a history of prior breast cancer with that of patients w ithout such a history. Specifically, they used data from the population-bas ed US Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program to assess time to death from ovarian cancer among ovarian cancer patients with and wi thout a prior breast cancer. All 25,637 White women diagnosed with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer in SEER registries between 1973 and 1995 were in cluded. Of these, 824 women had had a prior breast cancer diagnosis. The ov arian cancer death rate among women with prior breast cancer was significan tly lower than that of women with ovarian cancer only, adjusted for age and stage at ovarian cancer diagnosis. The survival advantage was most pronoun ced among older women and among those whose ovarian cancers were more advan ced at the time of diagnosis. These results lend indirect support to prior findings of improved ovarian cancer survival in BRCA1 mutation carriers.