Lipids in serum of patients with malignant ovarian neoplasms.

Objective: In numerous papers, different associations of serum lipids and lipoproteins with neoplastic diseases were found. The aim of our work was to find out associations between levels of 11 serum lipids, lipoproteins and ovarian cancer.

Methods: 25 healthy women and 25 patients with ovarian cancer underwent examinations. Uni- and multivariate analysis of variance and discrimination analysis were used to analyze our results.

Results: The analysis demonstrates that ovarian carcinoma is associated with a significant reduction of total cholesterol and its esters in serum and in high density lipoprotein fractions compared to controls.

Conclusion: It could be shown that using multivariate analysis of variance it is possible to find the optimal set of serum lipid parameters, containing serum esterified cholesterol, serum total cholesterol and high density lipoproteins esterified cholesterol, to differentiate healthy persons from patients affected by ovarian cancer.