With the recent advances in general surgery, the treatment of
cervical cancer has been markedly improved to increase the five-year survival rate after radical
hysterectomy. Therefore, the operative main attention has recently been directed towards conservative surgery for the function of pelvic organs as well as towards the therapeutic improvement of
cervical cancer. The most crucial point for the preservation of the ovary at the time of the operation is whether the
cancer metastasizes to the ovaries or not. In order to answer this question, the factors influencing
metastasis, such as; the clinical stages, the
cancer cell types and the
cancer extension to the uterine corpus, were studied. A total of 679 cases of
cervical cancer stage 0 and stage Ia were treated surgically with a simple
hysterectomy preserving the ovaries in orthotopic position during the period of 1970 to 1984. Three hundred eleven patients of invasive
carcinoma in stage Ib to stage IIIb were operated on by a radical
hysterectomy with
lymphadenectomy from 1977 to 1985. Histopathological examination was performed on specimens of the ovaries to determine the
metastasis. In order to study the incidence of the ovarian
metastasis in advanced
cancer patients, the data of the autopsied 674 cases who died of
cervical cancer without surgical
therapy were obtained from Annual of the Pathological Autopsy Cases in Japan (1965-1978). Follow-up observations on the 679 patients of stage 0 or stage Ia after the operation revealed no recurrence in these cases. This indicates that almost no ovarian
metastasis occurs in the patients of early cervical
carcinoma.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)