Purpose: to determine management problems of ovarian masses in girls in order to form a baseline for prospective randomized studies of the established topics and quality improvement of our management.
Materials and methods: We performed a national analysis of clinical aspects of ovarian masses in girls operated on in Poland, analyzed retrospectively medical files of all consecutive patients aged 0-18 who underwent surgeries for ovarian lesions between 2012 and 2017 at 17 pediatric surgical departments and complemented the analysis with a scoping review of a recent primary research related to ovarian masses in children.
Results: The study group comprised 595 patients. Forty-four (7.39%) girls were diagnosed with malignant tumors. The overall preservation rate was 64.54%. The analysis revealed that positive tumor markers (OR = 10.3), lesions larger than 6 cm (OR = 4.17) and solid mass on ultrasound examination (OR = 5.34) are interdependent variables differentiating malignant tumors from non-malignant lesions (X42 = 79.1; p = 0.00000). Our scoping review revealed 10 major branches of research within the topic of ovarian masses in pediatric population.
Conclusions: We have developed an overview of the field with the emphasis on the local environment. Our next step is a multi-institutional prospective study of a quality improvement project implementation based on the obtained knowledge.
Keywords: child; evidence-based practice; ovarian cysts; ovarian masses; ovarian neoplasms; prospective studies; quality improvement; scoping study; therapeutics.