Breast cancer patients can freeze eggs without delaying treatment

World
Europe

According to researchers at University of California, San Francisco, women who receive a breast cancer diagnosis don't need delay their chemotherapy as a new technique allows them to freeze their eggs and embryos quickly.

The researchers, who reported their findings in a paper published Saturday in Human Reproduction, developed a fertility preservation procedure that takes two weeks – speeding up the process by at least 50 percent.

They examined how long it took for 89 breast cancer patients at the UCSF fertility clinic to start neoadjuvant chemotherapy, a process in which patients are given chemotherapy prior to surgery, shrinking aggressive tumors, and found the results were the same regardless of if the women decided to freeze their eggs or not.

Photo via Getty Images

They also looked at the medical records of breast cancer patients between the ages of 18 and 45 who had been referred to the UCSF Center for Reproductive Health between 2011 and 2017, before starting the neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which will put them into menopause.

Two thirds of the women decided to harvest their eggs – using the new, faster ovarian stimulation technique – before cancer treatment. The remainder decided against it, after receiving counseling from the fertility clinic.

However, both groups took nearly the same time to start chemotherapy: An average of 38 days for the women who froze their eggs and embryos, and 39 for those who did not.

Mitchell Rosen, an associate professor at UCSF and the senior author of the study, said he undertook the research because cancer doctors have lately become reticent to refer their patients for fertility preservation, out of fear that it would delay the more aggressive timeline of neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Photo via The Telegraph

But now fertility experts can harvest eggs in as little as two weeks, using random-start ovarian stimulation, which does not wait for a woman's natural menstrual cycle to stimulate ovaries to release eggs. Before this technique was developed, doctors timed the procedure with a woman's natural cycle, which meant that it took them four to six weeks to harvest eggs.

"Women with breast cancer should feel confident about undergoing fertility preservation before starting chemotherapy," Rosen was quoted as saying in a news release. "The data clearly show that it will not delay their treatment, even in the neoadjuvant setting."

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency