Fertility Q&A Ovarian Tissue Freezing

Fertility Q&A Ovarian Tissue Freezing:

An emerging method of fertility preservation offers hope for women with cancer.

By Karine Chung, MD, MSCE

If you are preparing to undergo cancer treatment, you may already be aware that cancer therapies—including chemotherapy and radiation—can cause infertility and premature menopause. If having children after completing your cancer treatment is important to you, you may have begun to consider options for fertility preservation. Because your chance of future successful pregnancies is best when fertility preservation procedures are performed before chemotherapy or radiation, the amount of time available to pursue these procedures is often limited and depends on when your cancer treatment is scheduled to start........

Fertility Help Not Equal for Cancer Patients - in OB/Gyn, Infertility from MedPage Today

Fertility Help Not Equal for Cancer Patients - in OB/Gyn, Infertility from MedPage Today

 Action Points

• Note that in a retrospective study of women diagnosed with cancer between the ages of 18 and 40 years and treated with modalities with potential to affect fertility, women who had not attained a bachelor's degree were less likely to be counseled about fertility preservation.
• Note that counseling on and use of preservation services appeared to increase over time, although, as recently as 2007, nearly 40% of patients were not offered such counseling.

abstract: Too Early To Determine Cancer Risk from Infertility Treatments

Too Early To Determine Cancer Risk from Infertility Treatments

As more and more women wait to have children, the use of fertility drugs is rapidly rising, along with concerns about the possible association with increased risk of certain cancers, primarily of the breast, ovary, and uterus.

Such interest was on display when Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Sen. John Edwards, died from a recurrence of breast cancer in 2010, years after she had used fertility treatments. Researchers agree that the issue is important, given the millions of women who have been treated with fertility drugs. By one estimate, that number will climb to 7 million by 2025. 

But the findings from the few studies that have tried to address the issue have been mixed. Most have been conducted outside the U.S., primarily in European countries with centralized health care systems that can track pharmacy and cancer registries. These studies can have methodological limitations, but researchers say the largest drawback is that, usually, it is too early to tell whether an association exists, especially for drugs used for in vitro fertilization (IVF). 

“We are just really now getting into an era where we have enough women who are in the right age range to be able to evaluate their cancer risk,” said Louise Brinton, Ph.D., M.P.H., chief of the hormonal and reproductive epidemiology branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute.

But it won’t ever be completely clear whether these drugs cause even a slight increase in cancer risk, says Jennifer Litton, M.D., an assistant professor in the department of breast medical oncology at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “Infertility itself is a risk factor for increases in breast and ovarian cancers, so it is going to be difficult, if …(Blogger's Note: to read further subscription required $$$)

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