Research News on Pregnancy, Fertility and Breast Cancer
When you're diagnosed with breast cancer, you have so many decisions to make, and so many emotions to deal with: fear, anger, despair — it can be so overwhelming. Then, if you're pregnant when you're diagnosed, or if you want to get pregnant and have children in the future, the medical decisions become even more complex.
You may feel like you're the only one having to deal with pregnancy AND breast cancer. But you're not alone. More women are delaying having children until their late thirties and early forties. And as women grow older, their risk of breast cancer increases. Today, about one in four new breast cancer cases occurs in women of childbearing age. The result: more and more women are facing questions involving pregnancy, fertility and breast cancer.
Researchers are also paying more attention to these issues now. But it's not easy to study pregnancy in women with breast cancer, or women who have been treated for breast cancer. It's difficult to find women with the same cancer status and fertility outcomes, who can be compared in randomized clinical trials.
The studies done so far have mostly looked at small groups of women. Still, this research can begin to answer some of the most pressing questions about the safety of pregnancy for women with a personal history of breast cancer and the safety of breast cancer treatment during pregnancy.
Larger studies have tried to put together the results of many of the smaller ones. You'll find information from these large overviews in other areas of the Fertility, Pregnancy, Adoption section.
And there have been large studies looking at whether having an abortion affects a woman's breast cancer risk, and whether taking birth control pills affects that risk.
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