Does Childhood Cancer Impact Conception?

A new study says that women who battled cancer and survived during their childhood years can also have a fair chance of conceiving. Today's chemotherapy methods have very less impact on a women's ability of conceiving, say health experts.

On the other side of the coin, researchers say that men who have battled cancer during childhood may have significantly lower chances of reproduction. This could be due to the chemotherapy that involves strong doses of certain drugs which could impact the male reproductive health.

This study has some favourable results for women who wish to conceive after surviving a battle with childhood cancer. But unfortunately, there isn't any good news for men in this aspect till now. Scientists have to further look at other studies to conclude the same.

As a part of the study, researchers studied the data of many cancer survivors both male and female who crossed the age of puberty.
The study mainly focused on the impacts of drugs and chemotherapy on reproductive abilities. More than 10,000 men and women were studied in the research.

Of course, the study was totally confined to chemotherapy and not other treatment methods that utilise radiotherapy. The results claim that 70% of the female survivors could conceive after the treatments. But when it comes to men, only 50% of them could save their reproductive abilities after receiving cancer treatments. Researchers say that it could be due to the exposure to certain drugs.