Did you know that you can preserve your fertility?

Can fertility be preserved in cancer patients?

Thanks to advances in fertility preservation, a patient suffering from cancer is not condemned to give up future parenthood.

In women, when there is a medical indication for fertility preservation, as in the case of patients undergoing cancer treatment, it is very important to act before chemotherapy or radiotherapy begins, since the effects of these on fertility can be devastating. The success of preservation will depend to a great extent on the speed with which action is taken. It is also very important to evaluate each case individually, since certain factors, such as the presence of metastases, could make ovarian stimulation inadvisable.

The latest advances have made it possible to offer these women the opportunity to realize their dream of becoming mothers once the disease has been overcome. In the case of women who wish to delay motherhood without a medical indication, for personal reasons, fertility preservation offers them the possibility of having offspring at a later date and without giving up the possibility of having offspring of their own genetic material.

Unlike men, women are born with a limited endowment of oocytes which gradually diminishes throughout their lives, so that after the age of 35, only 10% of the initial reserve remains. This is accompanied by a reduction in oocyte quality, so that the woman’s chances of gestation are diminished with age and as time passes, this deterioration is progressive.

Fertility preservation techniques

Therefore, fertility preservation is advisable when there is still an adequate oocyte reserve, and this generally occurs up to the age of 35-38 years. In any case, even at older ages, each patient should be evaluated individually.

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The techniques with the best results for preserving fertility in women are oocyte vitrification and embryo vitrification.

In both cases, prior ovarian stimulation and recovery of the oocytes by follicular aspiration are required. Once the oocytes have been obtained, those that are of good quality and mature can be vitrified. In the case of embryo vitrification, the oocytes are previously inseminated with the couple’s sperm or those of a donor, as the case may be, and the resulting embryos are then vitrified.

In the case of fertility preservation in men who are going to receive oncological treatment or any other type of treatment that may pose a risk to their reproductive health, the freezing of their spermatozoa is performed beforehand. The survival to freezing of each frozen sample will be evaluated, since this survival depends on each individual, and according to this result, it will be advised to freeze as many samples as possible before the beginning of the therapy, thus making it possible for them to enjoy their paternity in the future.

There are other non-medical indications such as preserving sperm prior to a vasectomy or during assisted reproduction treatments if the male cannot be present or when he has difficulties in obtaining the sample at a given time.

In short, fertility preservation offers new options for achieving pregnancy.