The cancer rate is now 1 in 3. At some point in their lives, 1 in 3 people will suffer from cancer. Scientists anticipate that this alarming figure will rise to 50% of the population.
Many of the conventional medical treatments for cancer have an adverse effect on fertility and some treatments cause total infertility.
Cancer Treatments That Can Damage Fertility
Chemotherapy – this is dependent on the dosage given. High levels of chemotherapy can cause permanent infertility, lower levels may only be temporary.
Your age at the time of treatment is also significant as the younger you are the higher your chances of still having a baby.
Radiotherapy – if given to a reproductive area of the body can trigger infertility (such as pelvis, ovaries, testicles etc).
Cancer surgeries can sometimes have an effect, such as operations to remove the womb, testicles, ovaries, and other procedures done on the vagina or cervix.
What You Can Do To Safeguard Your Fertility If You Opt For Conventional Treatment
Usually, couples who are about to embark upon cancer treatment are given the option of freezing their sperm or embryos prior to treatment. Unfertilized eggs are not normally frozen as this process has a notoriously high failure rate and most eggs do not survive the freezing process. This is why embryologists prefer to freeze embryos.
The eggs and sperm would be collected and fertilized via an IVF procedure and then frozen for later use.
However, some types of cancer can be made worse by ovarian stimulation drugs used in IVF, such as ovarian and breast cancers, so it may not be possible to use your own eggs.
In this case, you would be advised to use donor eggs. Both your consent and that of your partner will be needed prior to any embryos being implanted, unless you have used donor sperm. In the UK, a maximum of 2 embryos can be put back in the womb at any one time. This is to reduce the larger number of IVF multiple births and the greater complications this has for both mother and child.
Ovarian tissue can also be frozen and then put back into the body so that eggs can be collected later, but this is very new and untried and at the moment there is little evidence that it works. It is, however, a promising technique for future IVF science.
If the male partner has cancer, the process is much simpler as then it is just a case of storing a sample of sperm. In healthy, fertile women, artificial insemination with previously frozen sperm has a good success rate for ensuring pregnancy.
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