Childhood Cancer Survivors Can Get Pregnant, Refuting Previous Studies

A new study suggests that women who had cancer as young girls can conceive, despite previous research indicating that they often have difficulty getting pregnant.

In the past, childhood cancer survivors were often told they may be unable to conceive due to the harmful effects chemotherapy and radiation could have on their ovaries. A team of researchers from the U.S. and Canada found that although female childhood cancer survivors take longer to conceive than their sisters, nearly two-thirds of infertile survivors eventually got pregnant.  

Dr. Lisa Diller, the study's senior author, and her colleagues used data from questionnaires in a study of 3,531 cancer survivors and 1,366 of their sisters between the ages of 18 and 39 years old. The results? Thirteen percent of survivors were clinically infertile, meaning they had been unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant for more than a year, compared to 10 percent of their sisters, according to the study in the journal Lancet Oncology.

The good news is that 64 percent of the 455 clinically infertile survivors eventually got pregnant. And that pregnancy rate is similar to that of clinically infertile women without a history of cancer, according to an editorial accompanying the new study.

"The main message counters what some people have thought, which is if you had cancer you won't be able to get pregnant or have children," Dr. Diller said.

Surprisingly, the study also found that cancer survivors who sought out fertility specialists were less likely than their siblings to get hormones or other fertility treatments to raise their chances of getting pregnant.

"We don't know if they weren't getting drugs because their doctors assumed they had untreatable problems or because the women themselves were more worried about taking fertility drugs after undergoing cancer treatments," study coauthor Dr. Elizabeth Ginsburg, a reproductive endocrinologist at Brigham and Women's, said.