New tool guides doctors to save cancer patients’ fertility
February 26, 2009 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
As medicine progresses, so do the specialties. Once, there were no official specialists in senior care and now there are gerentologists, for example. Another new field is now oncofertility – doctors who work with people who have had cancer to help them be able to have children. This is a big field now because of the larger number of children who are surviving childhood cancers and young adults who are also surviving treatment. Statistics show that almost 80% of children in the US who are diagnosed with cancer survive into adulthood.
To help doctors in this field, a guide has been written that reviews the newest technologies in fertility and fertility treatments. The guidelines, published in an article in the most recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, help doctors understand the issues and gives them the information to discuss these issues with their patients.
According to the press release, New tool guides doctors to save cancer patients’ fertility, issued by Northwestern University, "Younger patients in particular are not benefiting from fertility preservation options. A new national survey of pediatric oncologists showed that more than half of them are not using fertility preservation techniques that are available at most medical centers for their adolescent patients."
Hopefully, this work will help more cancer survivors continue on to have families if they choose to.
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Image: iStock
Tags: cancer blog, cancer fertility, cancer infertility, childhood cancers
