Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, a look at preventing ovarian cancer, which can be difficult to diagnose and treat.

Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Rebecca Stone, the director of gynecologic oncology at Johns Hopkins,

about changes in how we understand ovarian cancer, that much of what is called ovarian cancer

may actually start in the fallopian tubes and about an underused

surgery that preserves ovaries and may save lives. Let's listen. Rebecca Stone, thanks so much for

joining me. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. So today, I want to talk about

something with a difficult name to say, but it actually could save a lot of people's lives.

So we're talking about salpenjectomy, which is the removal of the fallopian tubes.

And I understand that this could really be a game changer in ovarian cancer.

Could you talk to me a little bit about, maybe about, let's start with

ovarian cancer, right? It's hard to screen for, and it's deadly, and this can reduce the risk.

Tell me, please. I think sometimes when I talk to people about this, the first thing they're thinking

is, well, okay, you're talking to me about ovarian cancer, and then you're

talking about a structure that's not the ovary. You're talking about the fallopian tube,

and so how do you make sense of those two things? And this is, the fact that we're talking

about the flopian tube is related to a relatively recent scientific

discovery that a large number of ovarian cancers or types of cancer that we have historically

...