Salvage therapy for recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer.

There are no comparative prospective trials to support dogmatic statements concerning the sequence and duration of therapy in the salvage setting. Although the literature offers many examples of chemotherapy studies conducted in the salvage setting, these studies typically involve relatively small numbers of younger patients whose disease shows good performance. The extrapolation of these observations to the practice setting, compounded by the clinical and molecular heterogeneity of epithelial ovarian cancer, further exacerbates the difficulties encountered in individual treatment recommendations.