Strengthening Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Studies

This article describes the elements in the design of cancer-prevention trials and the skills needed to evaluate the study outcomes in this field. Efforts to prevent gynecologic malignancies face some methodological challenges common to other cancer-prevention studies, such as choice of study design, population to be studied, and agent to be administered (or intervention to be made). Flaws in making these choices or in analyzing results can lead to misattribution of effects or cause important findings to be overlooked. In addition, some investigators must address issues that have arisen in response to prevention-trial results from the past decade. Cancer prevention efforts have recently suffered some well-publicized and not-so-well publicized setbacks. The prominence of some of these findings should not overshadow well-established achievements and recent successes.