Can a patient with kidney cancer get pregnant?

According to a study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center, egg freezing is a very good option for female cancer patients who want to preserve their fertility before chemotherapy. For couples, embryo freezing is still the preferred method, and for young patients, freezing eggs or embryos has a 40 to 50 percent chance of giving birth to a baby.

Although patients can choose to cryopreserve embryos, oocytes, or ovarian tissue, oocyte cryopreservation is the most popular and offers many advantages, including increased reproductive autonomy and reduced moral, personal, and religious dilemmas.

The official guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) emphasize that embryo freezing has a higher pregnancy rate and say it may be a more reliable option. However, for single women, creating embryos is often impossible unless donated sperm is used. For such patients, freezing eggs is a reasonable option to preserve fertility.

The NYU study involved 231 cancer patients with an average age of 31 years who were admitted to the center from 2005 to 2014. The most common cancers were breast cancer (84 invasive and 15 ductal carcinoma in situ), followed by gynecological (39 ovarian cancers, 18 cervical cancers, 11 uterine cancers, 2 vaginal cancers, and 1 vulvar cancer), hematology (27 Hodgkin's, 6 non-Hodgkin's, and 9 leukemias), and other (10 central nervous system, 6 gastrointestinal, and 3 genitourinary).

As expected, the mean age was highest in patients with breast cancer (35 years) and lowest in patients with blood cancer (24 years). An average of 18 oocytes were retrieved and 15 were cryopreserved; however, the type of cancer affected the yield.

In terms of marital status, 61% of women were single and 39% were married, and the average age at the time of cryopreservation was 34. Among single women, the vast majority chose to preserve only oocytes, and only 2% chose to preserve oocytes and embryos formed with donated sperm. For women in a relationship, the proportion of choosing to cryopreserve oocytes was relatively low, but still as high as 52%, which is strong evidence of the importance of reproductive autonomy.

To date, 10% of patients have returned and thawed their oocytes or embryos, an average of 2.3 years after cryopreservation. The pregnancy rate for each implantation of thawed fertilized oocytes is 40%, and the pregnancy rate for each implantation of thawed embryos is 25%. Currently, 4 babies have been successfully born, 1 is currently pregnant, and one breast cancer patient and 3 gynecological cancer patients used a gestational carrier (i.e., surrogate).