Rising ovarian cancer mortality in the elderly: a manifestation of differential survival.

Ovarian cancer mortality among the elderly in developed countries is increasing. Using published United States mortality data, annual age-specific ovarian cancer mortality rates from 1951 to 1989 were determined for the over-60 age groups and compared to corresponding annual age group population sizes. Rising ovarian cancer mortality rates among the elderly in the United States from 1951 to 1989 were increasingly dependent, with increasing age, upon increasing age group population size. These findings suggest that differential survival, and its effect upon the surviving gene pool in an aging population, may account for some of the observed increase in ovarian cancer mortality rates among recent successive elderly cohorts.