[3] It has also been debated that an egg cell fertilized outside of the ovary could implant on the ovarian surface, perhaps aided by a decidual reaction or endometriosis.
[3] Ovarian pregnancies rarely go longer than 4 weeks; nevertheless, there is the possibility that the trophoblast finds further support outside the ovary and thus may affect the tube and other organs.
[5] Ideally, ultrasound will show the location of the gestational sac in the ovary, while the uterine cavity is "empty", and if there is internal bleeding, it can be identified.
[7] Histologically, the diagnosis has been made by Spiegelberg criteria on the surgical specimen of the removed ovary and tube.
Patients with an ovarian pregnancy have a good prognosis for future fertility and therefore conservative surgical management is advocated.
[9] Further, in attempts to preserve ovarian tissue, surgery may involve just the removal of the pregnancy with only a part of the ovary.
[12] Once the study of physiology emerged,[13] Boehmer classified extra-uterine pregnancy into three classes: abdominal, ovarian, and tubal.
[17] With Mayer's 1845 denial that ovarian pregnancy could exist, physicians began taking more care in their descriptions and analysis of cases.
[19] In 1899, Catharine van Tussenbroek finally settled the question of the existence of ovarian pregnancy,[12] by providing the first accurate clinical and histological description of a case.