Incidence of ovarian metastasis in patients with cancer of the uterine cervix.

During the period from 1970 to 1985, 706 patients with cervical cancer of stage 0 and Ia were treated by a simple hysterectomy without oophorectomy. In 326 patients with invasive carcinoma in stage Ib to stage III, who were treated by a radical hysterectomy from 1977 to 1985, histological examinations were performed to detect ovarian metastasis. A total of 674 autopsy specimens were obtained from the Annual of the Pathological Autopsy Cases in Japan. (Japanese Pathological Society, 1965 to 1978). Follow-up observations on stage 0 and stage Ia revealed no recurrence in the ovaries. In invasive cases of epidermoid carcinoma (stage Ib to stage III), no ovarian metastases were detected, despite discovery of metastases to the pelvic lymph node in 21.6% of the cases. Conversely, in the cases of cervical adenocarcinoma (pure adenocarcinoma and mixed carcinoma), 6 of 48 cases (12.5%) showed ovarian metastases. Ovarian metastases were found in 22 of 77 (28.6%) autopsy cases of adenocarcinoma, but in only 104 of 597 (17.4%) cases of epidermoid carcinoma. This finding is statistically significant (P less than 0.02). Both corpus invasion and metastasis to the ovaries were found in 20 of 54 cases (37.0%). This rate was significantly higher than the rate of ovarian metastasis in cases without corpus invasion (P less than 0.001).