In this episode of the IJGC podcast, Editor-in-Chief Dr. Pedro Ramirez is joined by Drs. Kirsten Jorgensen and Alex Melamed to discuss fertility sparing surgery in cervical tumors (<4 cms). Kirsten Jorgensen grew up in Juneau, Alaska. She completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard College, following that she spent a year working in Lima, Peru for Partners In Health as part of a post-graduate scholarship. She then completed medical school at the University of Washington followed by residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. She just began her final year of gynecologic oncology fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Alexander Melamed is a gynecologic oncologist and clinical outcomes researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Associate Professor in the department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. His research seeks to understand how healthcare delivery impacts patient outcomes. Dr. Melamed has a strong interest in study design and methods for causal inference.

Highlights:

-Current guidelines offer mixed recommendations for fertility-sparing surgery for those with a cervical cancer tumor size between 2cm and 4cm

-This work sought to critically assess how the oncologic risk changes as tumor size increases without placing artificial cutoffs

-Results must be interpreted within the limitations of a database study, but do seem to suggest that there is not a significant inflection of risk at 2cm, or any other size up to 4cm.