Looking for tumors in a woman's ovaries can difficult to detect early on, making ovarian cancer extra dangerous, but new screenings show promise, BBC News reported.

4,051 women participated in a new study, published in the journal Cancer, to test a new screening method to try and identify ovary tumors earlier than ever before. According to U.S. researchers, the tests are showing promise so far, but the U.K. study will not be completed until 2015.

The survival rate for ovarian cancer is 90 percent when caught early on compared to 30 percent when it does undetected until later on. It is hard for doctors to identify because the symptoms - pelvic and abdominal pain - are the same as many common ailments.

Currently, there is no mass screening available for this kind of cancer.

"Clinical practice definitely should not change from our study, but it gives us an insight - we didn't get a lot of false positives," Dr. Karen Lu told the BBC.

Scientists already associate elevated levels of the protein CA125 in the bloodstream with ovarian cancer, but that alone is not enough. On its own, CA125 screenings have missed patients with cancer and given healthy people false positives.

The U.S. study at the University of Texas tested the idea of using the blood test to categorize patients into high, medium and low risk groups. High-risk patients get an ultrasound to look for tumors, medium-risk patients return for testing after three months and low-risk patients return in one year.

The U.S. study looked at post-menopausal women for an 11-year average and ten were reported to have their cancer detected by ultrasound at an early stage. The U.K. study, Lu said, will include 50,000 women and should provide more definitive results.

"There are two big questions," Lu said. "Do we see cancers at an earlier stage and do we decrease the number of deaths."