FRIDAY'S DIGEST: Fertility Facts, News and Views - Cancer Treatment and Fertility

Women of childbearing age and men battling cancer, will sadly find that their infertility is affected due to cancer treatment.

Cancer treatment can affect fertility in a number of ways although it largely depends on the age, type of medication used, type of cancer and target area for chemotherapy or radiation.

Infertility can be permanent or temporary although it can never be determined how soon it will be restored.

This is why women and men diagnosed with cancer have been preserving their fertility. Women are freezing embryos, having parts of their ovaries frozen or take a hormone which puts their ovaries into temporary menopause, while men are doing sperm banking, which simply involves collecting a sample of semen and freezing it.

I learnt as recently as yesterday, on a local newscast, that there seem to be a new drug that can be administered to women at the time of their cancer treatment, which also freezes the ovaries until cancer treatment is completed so that later when a woman decides to have children, her ovaries will be unaffected by her cancer treatment, making it possible and safe to conceive.

Apparently this finding is very new because I was not able to find any further information online. I will continue to check, so stay tuned for more on this.

The more we know.....








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Good News for Cancer Patients of Childbearing Age

Sadly, many women of childbearing age who has cancer, and are undergoing chemotherapy, do not  know that their ability to conceive can be severely hampered, because of the drugs administered in this process. As a result, women in this regard are encouraged to have this conversation with their doctor.

There is renewed reasons to hope though, that they still will be able to conceive, as Northwestern Medicine scientists have now found a way to prevent the demise of immature ovarian eggs due to chemotherapy.

Read more in this regard, by following the link below:-

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617142332.htm

From the article:

"This research advances the efforts to find a medical treatment to protect the fertility and hormone health of girls and young women during cancer treatment, " said So-Youn Kim, the lead investigator and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Teresa Woodruff, chief of fertility preservation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. 

Adding imatinib mesylate to the drug cisplatin blocks the action of a protein that triggers a cascade of events resulting in death of the immature eggs. Kim discovered the protein that triggers the oocyte's ultimate death is Tap63.

 Previous research suggested that imatinib is a fertility-protecting drug against cisplatin, but reports of the drug's effectiveness have been contradictory, Kim said. Her research confirms its effectiveness in an animal model."

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