Help to fight Cancer

Help Zara to fight Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer is often referred to as the "silent killer" but this is an unhelpful and inaccurate term. It’s not that symptoms cannot be spotted until the cancer is in the later stages, it’s just that they’re difficult to accurately identify and for young women, diagnosis is often even harder to come by. A woman’s risk of developing ovarian cancer increases with age and in the UK more than half of cases diagnosed are in women aged over 65. Only around 1,000 women under 50 are diagnosed each year, and this falls to just 220 for women aged under 30.

There’s no screening for ovarian cancer and, according to her doctor, there are four main symptoms of ovarian cancer: persistent bloating, difficulty eating or feeling full during meals, needing to pee all the time or increasingly urgently, and abdominal or pelvic pain. She explains that, because ovarian cancer in young women is not common, for women like Zara, it might not cross their minds that these problems could be caused by cancer.