This statistical report represents a quarter of a century of data collection, from 1982 until 2007, from the Queensland Centre for Gynaecological Cancer (QCGC), located at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and Mater Hospital, Brisbane, Australia. This report is the culmination of over a year’s work in compiling and analysing prospectively collected data from patients’ management, and would not have been possible but for the dedication and hard work of the gynaecological oncologists who work under its banner. The QCGC has the largest and most detailed gynaecological cancer database of records in Australia, and quite possibly the world. Perusal of these reports shows survival curves out to 192 months, or 16 years. Mr Jackson collated the data and edited this report, Mr Tripcony performed detailed statistical analyses, and Dr Kondalsamy-Chennakesavan helped in interpreting and discussing the findings. This of course provides invaluable information not only on standard five-year survival and median survival but also on long term survival. The database software used, the clinical administration system or CAS from Mirrabooka Systems Pty Ltd (http://www.mirrabooka.com/cas.shtml) has provided the means to accumulate this extensive and detailed collection of data. A number of interesting findings have come out of this analysis. For each site, we have compared the outcomes for two nine-year periods, 1984-1993 and 1994-2003. It is reassuring to see that for ovarian and uterine cancer the outcome in terms of survival has improved significantly with time. The analysis of ovarian cancer showed some very interesting results. The amount of residual disease left at the end of cytoreductive surgery was a very powerful determinant of survival, second only to disease stage. The results presented here are in respect to all stages of ovarian cancer. It was realised that nil residuum would do extremely well because it would contain all of the stage I and stage II cases. However, this has also been shown to be the case for stage IIIC ovarian cancer; it seems that with stage IIIC of the disease, unless residual disease is reduced to less than one centimetre, there is little beneficial effect on survival. Detailed figures are not presented here as they will be the subject of a separate scientific publication, however, it does suggest that to date gynaecological oncologists have been too conservative in our approach to ovarian cancer surgery
