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Newsweek Shines a Light on Oncofertility

by Gabrielle on July 28th, 2008

You may have heard the term Oncofertility mentioned here at Fertility Notes before.

A Newsweek article that will be published in the August 4th issue of the magazine gives a great explanation of what Oncofertility is and why it matters so much to cancer patients.

According to Newsweek:

Of the 125,000 people under the age of 45 who are diagnosed with cancer each year, roughly half will receive treatments that will affect their fertility. The cancers that most commonly strike the young—leukemias, lymphomas and breast cancers—require some of the most toxic forms of chemotherapy, which target rapidly growing and fragile cells like hair follicles, sperm and eggs.

The good news: patients who would like to become parents have a growing array of options. Men are benefiting from a procedure that allows urologists to find a single live sperm to bank, which can then be used in an in vitro fertilization method that requires just one sperm. Women can freeze eggs or ovarian tissue, though success rates are still low. Those with partners (or donor sperm) can freeze embryos, the procedure with the best track record, though, like egg freezing, it’s available only to patients who have two to six weeks before starting treatment. On the horizon are less toxic chemotherapy agents as well as methods of shielding eggs and sperm from harm.

But can I just ask that you, dear docs, take a little more care in those “methods of shielding eggs and sperm from harm?”

Before I started the radiation segment of my treatment for Hodgkin’s Disease, someone thought that by pulling my ovaries behind my uterus (which would be shielded from the radiation by a big lead block), that would be good enough. Instead, it took years and several confused ultrasound technicians to finally locate those ovaries again - which were anything but shielded from harm.

I’m just sayin’.

Anyway, this is a nice article in mainstream media that’s not the NY Times (who has had fertility-related articles in nearly every Sunday edition for the last several weeks.) I dig it.

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