In the fight against cancer, your number one concern should be defying this destructive disease, keeping your spirits up and seeing to your overall health and well-being. Unfortunately, some women and men find that one of the side effects of many cancer treatments is infertility.
If you’re interested in having children in the future, it’s important to be honest with your cancer team. There may be ways to preserve your fertility. There are also alternative routes to parenthood you may not have thought of before. In this post, we will discuss how cancer treatments can affect fertility as well as the various options available to cancer survivors who wish to have children.
How Does Cancer Affect Fertility?
For a couple to make a baby, many things must line up perfectly. Cancer, or more often cancer treatments, can cause changes in fertility in both men and women. If you wish to have children in the future, it’s important to know how the different types of treatments can affect your or your partner’s fertility.
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy, or chemo, works by killing any cells in the body that divide quickly. Because sperm cells divide rapidly, they’re often targeted and damaged during chemo and can result in permanent infertility. However, sperm production returns for many men after one to four years.
Chemo can also damage a woman’s eggs. Depending on your age, the types of drugs given and doses, fertility can be affected. However, it’s difficult to predict how fertile a woman will be after chemo.
Targeted, Immune and Hormone Therapies
In recent years, the use of targeted drugs and immune therapies has increased. However, not much is known about their effects on fertility in both women and men or how they impact pregnancy. Certain drugs have been found to:
- Cause ovarian failure
- Increase the risk of pregnancy complications
- Lead to congenital disabilities
It’s recommended that both men and women exposed to these drugs wait before pursuing a pregnancy as these medications can stay in your system for a few months after treatment ends.
Hormone therapy can impact a man’s ability to have a child in several different ways. Not only can it affect sperm production, but these drugs also can lower sex drive and lead to erectile dysfunction when taking them. However, these side effects usually improve once drug use is stopped.
Radiation Therapy
Treatments that utilize radiation use high-energy rays to kill off cancer cells. These rays can impact both women and men who wish to get pregnant in the future. Depending on the amount of radiation, where the rays are aimed and how much is absorbed, many people find themselves infertile after this form of treatment.
Radiation can impact women in several different ways:
- Damage ovaries
- Destroy some or all of the eggs
- Cause early menopause
- Scar the uterus, making it unable to stretch to full size during pregnancy
- Increase the risk of miscarriage, low-weight infants and premature births
- Affect the pituitary gland and ovulation
Men who undergo radiation are also at risk of infertility due to the treatment’s effect on sperm production.
Bone Marrow or Stem Cell Transplants
Both bone marrow and stem cell transplants often involve high doses of chemotherapy or radiation to the whole body. This can cause a woman’s ovaries to no longer release eggs or prevent men from making sperm. If this happens to either you or your partner, the results can be life-long changes to fertility.
Surgery
For both men and women, surgery is often the best chance of a cure for many different types of cancer. However, if surgery is performed on certain parts of the reproductive system, it can lead to infertility. Some cancers require the full removal of reproductive organs such as the:
- Uterus
- Ovaries
- Testicles
- Prostate
In many cases, surgeons will try to save one ovary or one testicle, which can potentially allow these women and men to become pregnant in the future.
Women can also have surgery to remove the cervix but preserve the uterus so that they can carry a pregnancy. Another risk involved in surgical procedures involving women’s reproductive organs is scarring to the fallopian tubes which can prevent eggs from traveling to meet the sperm.
Fertility Preservation at Western Fertility Clinic
Although cancer treatments can make achieving pregnancy more difficult, that’s not the end of the story. If you’ve survived cancer, we want to explore all possible options that can lead to your dream of having a child. It might not happen the way you planned before cancer. However, if you are flexible, you can still become a parent.
At Western Fertility Clinic, we offer fertility preservation services. There are a variety of preservation techniques as well as alternative routes to parenthood that can allow you to have a child, including:
Whether you are about to undergo cancer treatments or you’re already on the road to recovery, we invite you to contact us today to explore your fertility preservation options.