A quiet killer

Difficult to detect, ovarian cancer is silently taking the lives of women. Here's what you need to know.

- HANNAH VANDERHEIDE

It was a routine scan for recurring sciatica pain that would upend the life of hairdresser Kate Wylie.

In late 2023, the 33-year-old noticed a niggling pain in the back of her leg. Having been treated for sciatica five years earlier, she assumed it had returned. But upon receiving her scan results, the doctor mentioned a mass.

“The tumours were visible from the scan,” Kate says of the appointment that quickly pivoted from sciatica treatment to a referral to a gynaec-oncologist, where she would soon be diagnosed with low-grade serous ovarian cancer.

“It was a roller-coaster, because they didn’t say, ‘You’ve got cancer’, they just mentioned that there were tumours – I was thinking maybe it’s just endo [endometriosis] or polycystic ovarian syndrome [PCOS].”

But further scans soon confirmed her worst fears, that along with the upheaval of a cancer diagnosis, and despite the classification “low-grade”, Kate would soon be losing her reproductive organs, and with them, any chance of carrying a baby.

Statistics from Ovarian Cancer Foundation NZ paint a worrying picture. Our rates are among the highest in the world and it is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in New Zealand women. Just 36 per cent of Kiwi women with the disease survive five years, largely because many cases aren’t diagnosed until they reach an advanced stage.

However, there are important distinctions. “Ovarian cancer is a broad term, with low-grade tumours like Kate’s treated differently to high-grade tumours,” explains Dr Nikki Burdett, ovarian cancer researcher and medical oncologist at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. This means that both treatment and survival rates vary, with a lower rate of survival for high-grade cancers.

The fight for early detection