Tag: cancer

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Cancer gene mutation linked to earlier menopause

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(Reuters Health) – Women carrying BRCA mutations tied to breast and ovarian cancer may hit menopause a few years earlier than other women, according to a new study.

Doctors already discuss with those women whether they want immediate surgery to remove their ovaries and breasts, or if they want to start a family first and hold off on ovary removal.

“Now they have an additional issue to deal with,” said Dr. Mitchell Rosen, who worked on the new study at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.

An estimated one in 600 U.S. women carries the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation.

Those mutations greatly increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer at some point in her life increases from 12 to 60 percent with a BRCA mutation, and ovarian cancer from 1.4 percent to between 15 and 40 percent. Read full article.

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Infertility doctors and couples are fuming over a proposed bill in North Dakota

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Fargo, ND (WDAY TV) — A controversial piece of a abortion bill before the North Dakota Senate, has some couples and their infertility doctors fuming.

Senate Bill 2302 would limit the number of embryos a physician could transfer, and it would prevent a woman diagnosed with cancer, from storing embryos during chemotherapy.

Kathy Burgau, back in 1998, told the story of her cancer battle, hoping to have a family after chemotherapy, she had embryos frozen, so she could have children after cancer treatment. That was done here in Fargo, but this bill before the North Dakota senate tomorrow, does not allow us to freeze any embryos. It would make that illegal.

Dr. Stephanie Dahl, Reproductive Medicine Specialist: “If the bill passes, couples who want to freeze embryos before chemo, would have to go out of state. It is available now.”

And not just cancer patients. The proposed bill would limit the number of fertilized eggs an invitro-fertilization specialist could transfer into a patient during that cycle to two eggs. It could financially and emotionally cripple couples trying to conceive by way of IVF. Read full article.

 

 

 

 

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Predicting the age at menopause of women having suffered from childhood cancers

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This study provided important data about the fertility window of women who had suffered from childhood cancer and information concerning the associated risk factors, but did not confirm the greater risk of premature menopause (before the age of 40) that was reported by the American studies.

The results were published in the review Human Reproduction of November 15.

Women who have suffered from childhood cancer are known to run a greater risk of premature menopause. However, data about the associated risk factors is limited. Researchers from unit 1018 “Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health (CESP)” (Inserm/Université Paris-Sud/Institut Gustave Roussy) and from the AP-HP analyzed the data from a French cohort, named Euro2k, concerning 1522 survivors of childhood cancer diagnosed between 1945 and 1986 when they were under 18, initially in order to study the mortality rate. The study estimated the radiation doses received at the ovaries by the women in this cohort who had been treated by radiotherapy. 706 of these women filled in a detailed questionnaire about their state of health. 32% of these women had already reached the age of 40 years; 7% were over 50 years of age. The research team studied the age at menopause of these women and the potentially associated risk factors. The researchers based this study on self-reported questionnaires sent to the women in order to obtain information about the menopause, without confirming by measuring FSH levels.

Analysis of this data showed that 97 women (13,7%) were menopaused at a median age of 44 years, in other words, 7 years earlier than the general population. For a third of these women (36%), menopause was surgically induced. Read full article.

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After Cancer, Stem Cells Restore Male Fertility

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U. PITTSBURGH (US) — After an injection of banked sperm-producing stem cells, male primates who become sterile due to cancer drug side effects were once again fertile.

A study published in Cell Stem Cell, describes how previously frozen stem cells restored production of sperm that was able to successfully fertilize eggs to produce early embryos.

Some cancer drugs work by destroying rapidly dividing cells. Since it isn’t possible to discriminate between cancer cells and other rapidly dividing cells in the body, the precursor cells involved in making sperm can be inadvertently wiped out leaving the patient infertile, explains senior investigator Kyle Orwig, associate professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and an investigator at Magee-Womens Research Institute. Read full article.

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Fertility Preservation for Cancer Patients: Demographic Disparities in Counseling and Financial Concerns Are Barriers to Utilization

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Several teams of researchers will present new survey data covering the use of  fertility preservation for cancer patients at the Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

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Ovarian Cancer Screenings Not Effective, Panel Says

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Tests commonly recommended to screen healthy women for ovarian cancer do more harm than good and should not be performed, a panel of medical experts said on Monday.

The screenings — blood tests for a substance linked to cancer andultrasound scans to examine the ovaries — do not lower the death rate from the disease, and they yield many false-positive results that lead to unnecessary operations with high complication rates, the panel said. Read full article.

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1/3 of Child Cancer Patients May be Infertile in Adulthood

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Childhood cancer patients face an uncertain future regarding whether they have remained fertile, and a recent German study makes this abundantly clear.

According to findings published inDeutsches Arzteblatt International, as many as 30 percent of childhood cancer survivors are suspected of being rendered infertile because of their anti-cancer treatments.

Researchers collected data from 2,754 participants (1,476 of whom had been treated for a leukemia subtype, and the rest, for solid tumors). Of those, 210 agreed to undergo fertility testing, and infertility was suspected in thirty percent. Read full article.