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Nowadays, no standard approaches for follow up in ovarian cancer (OC) patients exist. While the role of ultrasound (US) is well defined in primary diagnosis of OC, it is still controversial during follow-up of surgically treated OC. The aim of this narrative review is to evaluate the role described in literature of US imaging in the early detection of OC recurrences. A review of the English literature present in PubMed and SCOPUS of the past 30 years regarding the use of US in recurrent ovarian cancer (ROC) has been performed. The following keywords were searched: "ultrasound and recurrent ovarian cancer" and "intraoperative ultrasound and recurrent ovarian cancer". A total of 15 articles were selected. US was mainly adopted in the detection of recurrent pelvic disease after debulking surgery, after fertility sparing surgery (FSS) and as an intraoperative tool for localization of OC recurrences. If introduced as a standard follow-up procedure, US may have a central role in the early detection of pelvic OC recurrence, in ovarian localization of relapses of borderline ovarian tumor (BOT) and early stages disease treated with FSS; it may also play an important role in the intraoperative localization of previously suspected secondary lesions.

Uterine leiomyomas are a common finding in medical practice, but their frequency changes drastically when contextualized in a syndrome, as in the following case. A 50-year-old woman with a known Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome presented at our clinic with abdominal pain located in the lower quadrants and scarcely responsive to analgesic therapy. A twisted gynecological pelvic mass was diagnosed, and management for prompt resolution was adopted. Histologically the mass was described as a leiomyoma. The aim of the present study is to share our experience and to review the literature to compare different manifestation of the disease and different approach used in the various centers. The additional novelty of the paper is the immunohistochemical study we carried out on the leiomyoma that is contrasted with the current etiopathogenetic theories.

Introduction and aim Carbohydrate Deficient Transferrin (CDT) is one of the most used biomarkers for monitoring alcohol use in pregnancy. However, its effective application in this context is hampered by the demonstrated physiological progressive increase during pregnancy (even in abstinent women) of CDT values, which in the third trimester can reach values close or exceeding the cut-offs usually adopted in clinical and forensic diagnostics. The present work was aimed at the re-assessment of CDT reference values in pregnancy. Materials and methods The CDT analysis was performed by a validated HPLC-UV Vis method on 284 serum samples of women with a physiological pregnancy and on 370 sera of non-pregnant woman from the general population (control group). All the samples were tested also for GGT for excluding alcohol abuse. The statistical analysis was performed using the MedCalc® Statistical Software. Results The re-definition of the specific reference concentrations was carried out according to the Horn and Pesce Robust Method. The resulting CDT upper reference values were 1.45%, 2.01% and 2.05% in the first, second, and third trimester, respectively. Conclusions In order to prevent the development of maternal and fetal prenatal alcohol exposure complications, the use of alcohol biomarkers, including CDT, has been proposed. However, this biomarker, in the monitoring of alcohol use in pregnancy, has so far been applied adopting the same cut-off used for general population without taking into consideration the progressive physiological increase of its value throughout the pregnancy. In the present study, a specific re-assessment of the CDT reference concentrations of each trimester is reported.