Booklet: What You Need to Know about Ovarian Cancer

Introduction

Each year, more than 22,000 women in the United States learn they have ovarian cancer. This National Cancer Institute (NCI) booklet will give you some important information about the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of this disease. This booklet also has information to help you deal with ovarian cancer if it affects you or someone you know. Other NCI booklets are listed in the Other Booklets section.

Our materials cannot answer every question about ovarian cancer. They cannot take the place of talks with doctors, nurses, and other members of the health care team, but we hope our information will help with those talks.

Words that may be new to readers appear in italics. Definitions of these and other terms related to ovarian cancer can be found in the Glossary. For some words, a "sounds-like" spelling is also given.