In a discouraging finding for ovarian cancer patients, a screening conducted at the University College London, which scientists claimed was one of the largest so far, did not find much decline in the death rate of the affected persons even if they religiously came for a follow-up of the disease for more than a decade. It found that the difference was no better than those patients who did not go in for screening during the trial period.

The research, reported in The Lancet, showed a yearly decline in the death risk by a 15% (for those who opted for follow-up) and 11% (those who did not come forward for screening).

Ian Jacobs, MD, of University College London, and co-authors, though, said they would continue follow-up in the study to determine minutely the magnitude of mortality.

The trial participants attended an average follow-up of 11.1 years, which extended to a maximum of 14 years in some cases. The screening came to an end on December 31, 2011. In all, the patients in the “multimodality screening group” underwent 345,570 screens.

The data gathered by the university team found that “148 (0.29%) women in the multimodality arm died of ovarian cancer, 154 (0.30%) in the ultrasound arm, and 347 (0.34%) of the women who were not screened”.

“The main limitation of this trial was our failure to anticipate the late effect of screening in our statistical design”, the authors added.