Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer among women of childbearing age. According to the Spanish Association against cancer, every year there are 25,000 new cases of breast cancer in Spain. One of the biggest concerns of women after the diagnosis of the disease is if they will have the possibility of having children, or having them again, in case of being a mother and wanting to enlarge the family.
Years ago it was not possible and the disease added the pain of seeing frustrated dreams of being a biological mother. Today, fortunately, there are more and more means available to preserve the fertility of women who must undergo cancer treatment. Thanks to them, ** more and more women manage to become a mother after breast cancer **.
How to preserve fertility?
Many of the cancer treatments cause damage to the oocytes, most often irreversible. These can affect a woman's fertility because the drugs administered directly affect the ovarian function. This implies that at an older age, the difficulty of getting a pregnancy increases once the treatment is over.
They know each other Three fertility preservation techniques for women with cancer before treating the tumor: cryopreservation of embryos (cryopreservation), vitrification of ovules and freezing of ovarian tissue.
The most frequently performed is the vitrification of ovules, since many patients do not have a stable partner at the time of diagnosis or do not want to freeze embryos for personal reasons. First the temperature at which the oocyte is exposed is reduced, from 22º C initials to -196º C in a sudden way, so sudden that the cooling rate is 23,000 degrees per minute, unlike traditional techniques where the speed was Freezing was 1 ° C per minute. Subsequently, cryoprotectants are used to avoid any possible damage and finally frozen in "dry" with liquid nitrogen. Vitrification has survival rates of ovules close to 100%.
After cancer
If no measures have been taken to preserve fertility before the disease, after overcoming it, the recommendation is that of wait two years since cancer treatment ends to start fertility treatment. The odds of each woman according to her ovarian function will be evaluated with the oncologist and the chances of getting a pregnancy naturally will be assessed. After the disease, the most commonly used treatments to get pregnant are: in vitro fertilization, oocyte donation and embryo donation.
A hopeful message for women who face mom's cancer and want to be mothers someday. They say they are the most desired children. What is tried from the medical field, according to the study 'Safety of pregnancy after breast cancer', published in the European Journal of Cancer, is that hospitals increase efforts to inform patients undergoing chemotherapy about options that have to preserve their fertility, as well as offer treatments to those who could not access this option when they were diagnosed.
For those who want more information, the Baby Beatles organization has been created to help women who have experienced breast cancer become mothers.
