ABSTRACT
Endometrial corpus cancer (EC) is the fourth most common malignancy among United States women and the eighth most common cause of cancer-related death (1). The American Cancer Society estimated that 38,300 new cases of uterine corpus cancer were diagnosed during 2001 (1). Of these, 21% (or 8,043 women) had regional or distant spread of disease. Surgical staging and adjuvant therapy protocols for earlystage EC have been studied extensively and are associated with excellent long term survival outcomes. Patients with advanced disease, on the other hand, account for the majority
of tumor-related deaths and present a significant clinical challenge. Effective management strategies for this group have yet to be precisely defined. The therapeutic armamentarium for metastatic EC includes surgery, chemotherapy, irradiation, hormonal therapy, or some combination of these modalities. The focus of this chapter, however, is the surgical management of advanced-stage EC, with the specific objectives being to: 1) review the existing data on primary cytoreductive surgery for patients with stage III and IV disease, and 2) summarize the recent literature addressing the surgical management of uterine papillary serous carcinoma (UPSC).
