What scares most about assisted reproductive treatment is usually hormonal stimulation; obviously, if you have had hormone-dependent cancer, this fear is much greater, fearing that the use of hormonal drugs may cause a recurrence of the tumor. This fear is founded, but fortunately, today we have a lot of experience that can guide us and can support the safety of these treatments.
The hormones that increase significantly in assisted reproduction techniques are estrogens and progesterone, which can be a risk factor for the development of breast, uterine, or ovarian cancer.
Due to its high frequency, breast cancer is the one we know best, that we know how to treat, and that we have the most experience with in this field, although the basic idea is the same for all: to achieve a state of cure and absence of tumor cells that allows individuals undergoing fertility treatment not to have a greater risk of tumor recurrence.
This means that first, the tumor must be cured, and then a certain amount of time must pass without malignant cells being detected in the body. The treatment and disease-free time vary depending on each tumor.
These decisions become more complicated when these cancers occur in young women who do not yet have children: in cases where the treatment of the disease could cause a loss of fertility, we would have to consider freezing their eggs before starting tumor therapy. This means undergoing ovarian stimulation with the tumor still present and having clear conditions for the fertility preservation process to be carried out while maintaining all possible safety standards.
It is a solution that can still cause a lot of fear, but it is giving us very good results, allowing these women to become mothers with their own eggs once the tumor has been cured. The accumulated experience in these treatments has allowed us to establish specific guidelines according to the type of tumor, treatment, and individual. If we follow these guidelines, we can define that the hormonal therapies performed are safe, and the risks of cancer recurrence for this reason are minimal.
