Gynecologic cancers account for a large percentage of new cancers in women, with the number of new cases increasing in recent years. Out of the five gynecologic cancers, currently, only cervical cancer has an available population-level screening program available. However, cervical cancer accounts only for a small proportion of all the gynecologic cancers. The remaining four cancers: uterine, ovarian, vaginal and vulvar cancers, have no available screening programs and consequently, the majority of the new cases are diagnosed after the disease has spread to distant organs when survival is poor. Identifying individuals at high-risk of developing gynecologic cancers will allow the development of prevention strategies tailored to individuals at high risk. The objective of this project is to develop analytical tools to identify individuals at high risk of developing gynecologic cancers. Models will be developed specifically for each one of the five gynecologic cancers. In addition, a risk prediction model will be developed to predict the risk of death from all causes.
Risk prediction models will be developed using a comprehensive list of risk factors spanning sociodemographic, nutritional, occupational, and genetic factors. We will test the models and ensure that it can identify high-risk individuals with sufficiently high accuracy.
The proposed risk prediction models from this project may provide guidance to future guidelines on primary and secondary prevention for gynecologic cancers. The incidence of gynecologic cancers is increasing in recent years and there is a pressing need to accurately identify high risk individuals who are most likely to benefit from cancer prevention interventions. We anticipate that we will need three years or more to complete this study. Individual models may be developed sooner and will be disseminated through scientific publications and conference presentations.
