Study Finds Pap Smear May Yield Key to Detecting Ovarian Cancer

A new study published in the Jan. 9 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine has found that a woman’s routine Pap smear may soon be able to screen for uterine and ovarian cancers as well. Doctors working at Johns Hopkins found that if the samples collected from a small group of women during their routine Pap smears was put through a genome sequencing process called PapGene that almost all uterine cancers and a significant percentage of ovarian cancers that were present were reliably detected.