Cancer & Infertility: The Good Part of the Bad News

We've known for a long time now that cancer treatment can save lives but also render survivors infertile, even completely sterile. Young people who were surviving cancer more often found their new lives had a huge gap: little to no chance of being a parent in the future.

Spurred by organizations like Fertile Hope and the Young Survivors Coalition, researchers began focusing on fertility preservation techniques and their usefulness for this population. We've come a long way with what we can offer both men and women who want a chance at family-building after they're cancer-free. (At Houston Fertility Center, we offer a number of these techniques and even have a site devoted just to deferring conception by way of preserving fertility.)

Now, it appears as though the numbers of women with infertility resulting from cancer treatment is bigger than we thought. A large survey study by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has concluded that our previous understanding may have given women "unrealistically low assessments of their risks" for infertility.

Some of the salient points of this study:

*Acute ovarian failure (no longer having a menstrual period after chemotherapy) increases significantly with age at cancer diagnosis.

*For women who did not experience loss of menses, incidence of infertility increased significantly with age.

*The younger the woman was when diagnosed with cancer, the higher her chances of early menopause.

Learning that the impact of chemotherapy on fertility is greater than we assumed -- that's the bad news.

The good news? That we now have that knowledge and can let women and their oncologists know that the need for fertility preservation is more prevalent than we used to think.

Putting the Risks of IVF in Patients' Hands

Australia is home to some renowned fertility specialists. They've also developed a reputation for research on the offspring of IVF, and the most recent information is now being provided in brochure form to patients in Victoria. The brochure is produced by the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, an Australian institute that helps regulate the use of A.R.T. in that country.

The news about how "The Children of ART" are doing is important to the patients I see at Houston Fertility Center (Here's a link to a related newsletter, now archived on CallDrK.com.) IVF has been helping people conceive babies for more than 30 years now, so current patients can benefit from long-term studies on their development.

So far, the news is overwhelmingly positive, as this brief, related news piece from the Herald Sun explains. One of the biggest hurdles to health for both baby and mom is multiple pregnancy (often a precursor to preterm and premature births), and the fine-tuning of IVF techniques has resulted in far fewer of those. The article also mentions parenting anxiety as being more prevalent in IVF mothers, but I'd wager there are some cultural differences there. Seems to me that in this day and age, most savvy moms have a lot on their plate to worry about, so some anxiety comes with the territory -- no matter how your baby came to be.

The data on a topic as broad as "development of children born from IVF" will always be changing and sometimes debatable. The important thing is that it's out there, that researchers are continuing to explore with long-term studies, and the information is in the patients' hands.

~Dr. Sonja Kristiansen