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Objective. To present Danish national survival data on women with early stage endometrial cancer and use these data to discuss the relevance of postoperative follow-up. Design. Prospective study. Setting. Danish Endometrial Cancer Study (DEMCA). Population. Five hundred and seventy-one FIGO stage IA (1988 classification) endometrial cancer patients prospectively included between 1986 and 1999. All patients had total abdominal hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy without adjuvant therapy. Methods. The patient and the disease characteristics were drawn from the DEMCA database with cross-references to the national death registry and the national pathology database. Statistical methods included Kaplan-Meier, log-rank and Cox regression analysis. Main outcome measures. Survival rates in relation to histopathology. Results. The five year overall survival rate was 88.9% and five year disease-specific survival was 97.3%. Patients with low- (91.8%) and high-risk histopathology (8.2%) were compared. The age-adjusted overall and disease-specific survival differed significantly between women with low- and high-risk histopathology ( p = 0.039 and p = 0.004, respectively). The disease-specific survival adjusted for age between patients with well-differentiated endometrioid tumors differed from those with moderately differentiated tumors ( p = 0.008, hazard ratio = 3.75, 95% confidence interval 1.41-10.00). Recurrence data were available on 464 patients. Twenty-three (3.9%) experienced recurrence. Of these recurrences, 15 of 23 (65%) were vaginal. Death from recurrence was observed in nine of 23 (39%) patients, and five of these nine had vaginal recurrences. Conclusions. Women with FIGO stage IA endometrial cancer have a very high disease-specific five year survival. Survival was related to histopathology. Follow-up at a highly specialized tertiary care center for patients with an extremely good prognosis may be questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]