from PART IV - ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN FERTILITY AND ASSISTED REPRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
INTRODUCTION
Female cancer patients between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine years are expected to not only survive their disease but also lead normal lives, mainly because of newer, more effective cancer therapies such as sterilizing chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy. Consequently, fertility preservation has become an important quality-of-life issue. Problems with fertility and obstetric disorders such as early pregnancy loss, premature labor, and low birth weight have all been described after cancer treatment (1).
Recent achievements in assisted reproductive technologies such as novel ovulation induction remedies, oocyte cryopreservation, and ovarian tissue cryopreservation and transplantation have further expanded the options for fertility preservation in women scheduled to receive chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy. However, most of the potential fertility preservation strategies do not have long-term follow-up data. The latest committee report of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) states that embryo cryopreservation is the only option for these patients with sufficient evidence of clinical utility. The remaining options, including orthotopic transplantation of cryopreserved ovarian tissue, are either experimental or without enough evidence to be proposed to patients at this stage.
We will review the recent evidence on the pathophysiology of chemotherapy/radiotherapy-induced gonadal toxicity and the recent data on the indications and the outcomes of techniques used for fertility preservation in female cancer patients.
BASIC OOCYTE BIOLOGY
In humans, primordial germ cells arrive in the gonadal ridge from the yolk sac endoderm by the seventh week of gestation. These germ cells become oogonia, which proliferate by mitosis before differentiating into primary oocytes.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.