About ANECS

We aim to establish a large multi-disciplinary study of endometrial cancer. The study, entitled the Australian National Endometrial Cancer Study (ANECS) will compare information from ~1500 women with endometrial cancer to ~1500 age-matched controls without endometrial cancer, to find out which factors are more common in women with endometrial cancer, and are thus likely to be causing the disease. The information we will compare includes environmental/lifestyle exposures (assessed from detailed questionnaire information), family history of cancers (which estimates the likelihood of genetic effects), and variation in specific genes (assessed by looking at DNA markers). We will also attempt to recruit family members of women with a strong family history of cancer, to study the causes of disease in these families.

We also hope to collect tumour tissue from as many women as possible and practical, since this will allow us to assess the molecular changes in these tumours. From this we will develop a better understanding of what cellular changes drive the tumour progression in the different subtypes, and what treatments might be best for each of the different subtypes.