Slim chance at pregnancy worth it for woman fighting breast cancer

Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Being diagnosed with breast cancer was hard enough for Tiffany Majors. Then the 29-year-old Chicago woman found out that the treatment that might save her life could also leave her infertile.

“For my husband and I, one of our biggest goals is to have children and have a family,” said Majors, of Old Town. “So when the doctor told me there was a possibility I wouldn’t be able to have a child, that really scared us.”

So before Majors started chemotherapy and radiation last year at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, she and her husband, David, had six embryos, fertilized through in vitro fertilization, frozen for future use.

They can’t try for a baby for at least two years while Majors is on the drug tamoxifen. And her cancer still isn’t technically in remission. But having even a small chance to get pregnant is better than no chance at all, she said.

“I don’t know that I’ll be here tomorrow, but if there’s a chance, I’m going to go through with it,” she said.

Every year, about 140,000 men and women of child-bearing age are diagnosed with cancer nationwide. Chemotherapy and radiation can damage a woman’s ovaries and can also leave men infertile. Yet many cancer patients aren’t informed about their fertility preservation options before undergoing treatment. Fewer than half of the nation’s cancer doctors routinely refer their patients to fertility specialists, a 2009 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found.

Northwestern University is part of a network of 66 cancer centers — known as the national Oncofertility Consortium — trying to find new ways to preserve fertility and help cancer doctors refer their patients to reproductive specialists.

The consortium’s principal investigator, Dr. Teresa K. Woodruff of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said “the news is better than ever” for cancer patients who want to preserve their ability to have children.

A man can have his sperm or testicular tissue frozen before undergoing treatment.

For women, it’s more complicated. One option is to remove multiple eggs from the ovaries, fertilize them in a dish with sperm, then freeze the resulting embryos for future use, as Tiffany Majors did.

A newer option, called ovarian tissue cryopreservation, involves surgically removing an ovary, freezing strips of it, then transplanting that tissue back after cancer treatment.

Researchers also are trying to figure out how to grow immature eggs taken from the ovaries into mature eggs that can be fertilized. Children’s Memorial Hospital performed its first “ovarian harvest” for this purpose in February on a patient in her 20s who was about to undergo aggressive chemotherapy and radiation for a rare form of kidney cancer. 

Success isn’t guaranteed with any of these procedures. And cost can be another barrier, since health insurers don’t always cover fertility treatments for cancer patients.