The risk of having children who experience preterm birth and low birth weight—but not birth defects—may be increased among male adolescents and young adults with cancer, according to a recent study published by Murphy et al in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Background
Prior research has been reported on the outcomes of children of adolescent and young adult women with cancer.
“There has been very little research on childbirth and perinatal research for adolescent and young adult men with cancer,” explained lead study author Caitlin Murphy, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences at the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. “I hear often from adolescents and young adults in the community that fertility is the most important thing to them when they are facing a cancer diagnosis. It’s important to give them data-driven answers to their questions,” she continued.
Study Methods and Results
In the study, investigators used the Texas Cancer Registry, live birth certificates, and the Texas Birth Defects Registry to examine 42,896 adolescent and young adult men aged 15 to 39 years who had been diagnosed with cancer between January 1, 1995, and December 31, 2015. They were age- and race/ethnicity-matched to adolescent and young adult men without cancer.
The investigators found that compared with children born to men without cancer, preterm birth was 8.9% vs 8% (P = .02) and low birth weight was 6% vs 5.3% (P = .02) among children born to adolescent and young men with cancer. There was no statistically significant difference in the prevalence of birth defects between the groups. Further, the likelihood of live births was highest among men who had thyroid cancer (27.6%) and lowest among those with gastrointestinal cancer (9.6%) at 10 years postdiagnosis.
Conclusions
The findings underscored the significance of reproductive counseling among adolescent and young adult men with cancer. The investigators plan to study pregnancy complications in a large, diverse population of adolescent and young adult women with cancer over a 30-year period.
“There is a big push to offer counseling at the time of diagnosis related to fertility preservation, but as you can imagine, patients have just been diagnosed and are navigating their treatment—and now they have been told they need to make a decision about preserving fertility before they start chemotherapy,” Dr. Murphy emphasized. “It’s overwhelming. We want care teams to expand the scope of the counseling they provide to include reproductive health in general and expand it beyond the day of diagnosis,” she concluded.
Disclosure: The research in this study was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Cancer Control Research Training Program at the School of Public Health as well as supported by the National Cancer Institute. For full disclosures of the study authors, visit academic.oup.com.
