Two Louisiana doctors create new tool to detect endometrial cancer
BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — Two doctors from Louisiana have created a new screening tool for endometrial cancer.
Their project is a partnership among Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Our Lady of the Lake and LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. The study was also funded by the Baton Rouge Health District.
“When a woman has severe obesity their risk for endometrial cancer is much higher,” said Dr. Vance Albaugh, Assistant Professor of Metabolic Surgery, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Metamor Institute.
Albaugh said, “the possibility of identifying these ladies very early on in the course of disease, it’s make us I think feel like we really having an impact on these women’s lives.”
Assistant Professor of Metabolic Surgery at Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Metamor Institute, Dr. Vance Albaugh, and Dr. Jernigan with LSU Health Sciences Center partnered together on the research.
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“With endometrial cancer there is no, there is no defined screening tool or screening test, and so, but we knew we were seeing this in women much, much younger than previously,” said Dr. Albaugh.
The research started and both doctors collected data from obese female patients at the Baton Rouge site and New Orleans location.
“We decided, that, well let’s go ahead and take the group of patients who are proceeding with treatment of their obesity or women who are pursuing weight loss surgery. If we screened those patients somehow would we be able to potentially detect this cancer in them,” said Dr. Albaugh.
The doctors completed the task of screening the patients with a 10 item electronic questionnaire. Patients were asked to fill out the questions as they were filling out other paperwork.
“Electronically that scoring system was able to pick out the ladies that were higher risk and generate a list on the computer that we were very easily able to send letters to gynecologists or referrals and so really streamlining the process,” said Dr. Albaugh.
Dr. Albaugh said they discovered almost 50 percent of the women in their pool of subjects screened positive. He hopes this data leads to other hospitals in the region using and adopting the process. After it is adopted regionally, he hopes it will be implemented nationwide.
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“Baton Rouge Clinic, Baton Rouge General, Ochsner, Woman’s Hospital and really cast a wide net, potentially make this something that’s kind of standard of care kind of throughout the United States. Let’s go all in on this screening and see if we can really make a dent in kind of endometrial cancer and kind of prevent this in a lot of Louisiana women,” said Dr. Albaugh.
Endometrial cancer is the third fastest growing cancer in Louisiana over the past five years. It’s also the fastest growing cancer for young women in the state.
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