When women are pregnant, or breast feeding, or taking birth control pills, they are not ovulating, and they are therefore at reduced risk of ovarian cancer. When women are given ovulation inducing medications they may be slightly increasing their risk. Studies have varied, and most women don't ovulate too many 'extra' times with just a few short months of treatment, so ovarian cancer not regarded as an actual consequence of fertility enhancing ovulation treatments. But we have paid less attention to what the breast tissue response of ovulation treatments have been. One of the most common kinds of breast lump is a fibroadenoma. Not only are fibroadenomas of the breast not thought to be cancerous, but they are not thought to be able to turn cancerous. A single case has now been reported in Fertility and Sterility of a fibroadenoma breast lump turning into a cancerous tumor during fertility treatment. Fertility treatments increase estrogen blood levels and this is theorized to be the way a noncancerous breast lump could turn cancerous when stimulated with enough estrogen. Currently there are no specific recommendations for fertility patients who have non-cancerous breast lumps to be treated any differently than your gyno would normally. But this case calls attention to an important development in breast care that we will have to follow. Although we do not uniformly encourage women to do self breast exams, it may be that an infertilty patient undergoing ovulation treatments should be more attentive to them.
0 comments:
Post a Comment