|
 Researchers focused on 89 women newly diagnosed with breast cancer
who received counseling at a fertility clinic about a relatively new
technique known as random-start ovarian stimulation. This process
doesn’t wait for a woman’s natural menstrual cycle to stimulate the
ovaries to release eggs and can be done in about two weeks, compared
with four to six weeks with older ovarian stimulation techniques
timed to coincide with menstruation.
Overall, 67 of the women proceeded with random-start ovarian
stimulation before beginning cancer treatment.
With fertility treatment, women started chemotherapy an average of
38 days after their breast cancer diagnosis, compared with 39 days
when patients decided against fertility preservation.
“What this tells us is these women can still go on to build a
family,” said senior study author Dr. Mitchell Rosen, a reproductive
health researcher at the University of California San Francisco.
“It only takes two weeks, and it isn’t going to cause any delay in
their cancer treatment,” Rosen said in a telephone interview.
When chemotherapy is needed soon after a breast cancer diagnosis,
doctors generally advise that it begin within four to six weeks to
avoid hurting women’s survival odds.
Chemotherapy can cause infertility by damaging the ovaries and by
triggering an early menopause in women of childbearing age.
For the study, researchers examined data from medical records for
breast cancer patients between the ages of 18 and 45 who were
referred to the UCSF Center for Reproductive Health between 2011 and
2017 before starting chemotherapy.
Women started chemotherapy at roughly the same time whether or not
they decided to first harvest eggs and freeze eggs or embryos,
researchers report in Human Reproduction.
One limitation of the study is that it didn’t look at other reasons
beyond fertility preservation that might influence how long it takes
for women to start chemotherapy, such as tests to pinpoint the type
of tumors imaging to find out how far cancer has spread or patients
making arrangements to take time off of work or prepare their lives
for chemo.
[to top of second column] |
The study also wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove how
fertility preservation directly influences the time it takes to
start chemotherapy, and the results from one fertility center might
not represent what all women would experience.
Even so, the findings suggest that random-start ovarian stimulation
may be a viable option for women with breast cancer or other types
of malignancies who don’t want to lose their ability to have
children after tumors are in remission, said Dr. Kutluk Oktay,
director of the Innovation Institute for Fertility Preservation and
IVF in New York and a researcher at Yale University School of
Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
“With this approach, a patient can be started on ovarian stimulation
even on the day of the initial consultation and can be done with
embryo or egg freezing in two weeks,” Oktay, who wasn’t involved in
the study, said by email.
“And if she has more time, she can even do multiple cycles of
freezing without risking a delay in chemotherapy,” Oktay said.
“Random start extends all women who are considering embryo or egg
freezing before chemotherapy for any type of cancer more flexibility
and ability to preserve fertility with the least delay before
initiating ovary damaging cancer treatments.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2xfrni7 Human Reproduction, online September
9, 2017.
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
