Treatment helps young women preserve their fertility during breast cancer chemotherapy

Researchers have found that young women with breast cancer were able to better preserve their fertility during cancer treatments by using hormone-blocking drug injections that put them into temporary menopause. The results announced at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago are from the Prevention of Early Menopause Study (POEMS), a clinical trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (ASCO late breaking abstract #505). Women receiving the injections were only about one-third as likely to experience ovarian failure, a common long-term toxicity of chemotherapy treatments, and were more than twice as likely to have a normal pregnancy after their cancer treatment compared to women in the trial who did not receive the injections. Read more here.