When you think of the most common gynecological cancer, you probably don’t think of uterine cancer, but this cancer type is more commonly diagnosed than other gynecological cancers such as ovarian and cervical.
There were nearly 70,000 cases of uterine cancer in 2024, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Uterine cancer involves cancer of what many folks think of as the womb, “or the place where a pregnancy is housed and grows,” said Dr. Ami Vaidya, a gynecological cancer doctor at Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey.
“The uterus has two components; there’s a muscle wall and there’s a lining, an inner portion of the uterus that consists of glandular tissue,” Vaidya explained.
“And I mentioned these two different areas because very different cancers can start in the two different areas of the uterus,” she noted.
