High-grade serous tubo-ovarian cancer remains one of the deadliest gynaecological malignancies, mostly due to vague symptoms and late-stage diagnosis. This review explores the strengths and limitations of current early detection biomarkers, specifically for high-grade serous tubo-ovarian cancer. While significant progress has been made, challenges remain with low sensitivity and specificity of detection biomarkers and the need for multimodal approaches and validation in diverse populations. This review explores biomarkers with demonstrated potential for detecting early-stage high-grade serous tubo-ovarian cancer through non-invasive methods in the general population and have the potential to improve patient outcomes. To date, there is no biomarker-based screening or early diagnosis test that has been shown to reduce ovarian cancer mortality in the larger population. This review focuses on current and emerging biomarkers in high-grade serous tubo-ovarian cancer, including genomic and proteomic changes that have diagnostic potential. While there are no biomarkers that have been approved for population-wide screening, evidence strongly supports DNA methylation-based liquid biopsy approaches for screening and early detection of high-grade serous tubo-ovarian cancer. This review highlights emerging biomarkers for early detection through minimally invasive methods and underscores the challenges of existing detection biomarkers.
Atiq et al. (Fri,) studied this question.