The constant pinching or pinning of needles for some period at a stretch, the feel of some warm weird liquid rushing through your veins, the veins showing the proof of such "torture" by turning black, your hair giving up and denying clinging to your scalp, your disinterest in the foods which you really liked and your mouth refusing to cooperate with your food intake by becoming ulcerous, may all stand together to denote that you have undergone chemotherapy.
And women, on whose shoulders lies the responsibility of progeny maintenance, may suffer a bit more with researchers claiming that chemotherapy may cause ovarian failure. Older studies have linked chemotherapy side effects to the lack of menstruation or amenorrhea.
But the recent study conducted on Californian cancer patients, has suggested that chemotherapy may ultimately lead to early menopause and infertility. Moreover, the study findings have claimed that early menopause is mostly observed in young women diagnosed with cancer.
Researchers made use of the California Cancer Registry to enquire about the reproductive history of women, before and after chemotherapy. The questions of the survey were targeted towards drawing important conclusions on termination of menstrual periods, early menopause and the failed attempts to conceive.
Responses were received from 1,041 women in the age group of 18 to 40 years. And 620 of them had undergone sessions of chemotherapy. The researchers focused their study on five types of non-gynecologic cancer- breast cancer, Hodgkin's Disease, gastrointestinal cancers, non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and leukemia. Systemic chemotherapy can treat these cancers.
Acute ovarian failure was reported in 8, 10, 9 and 5 percent of women diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, breast cancer and gastrointestinal cancers respectively. The condition was found to increase considerably with age.
As mentioned earlier, younger women were found to experience an early menopause compared to older women. For example, 56 percent of 20-year old women, suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma may experience an early menopause compared to 16 percent of women who were 35 when the disease was diagnosed.
According to the researchers, the previous recommendations made my doctors in the area of preservation of fertility were based on limited data only. Now they hope that this new study, which considers age as well as cancer-type, will offer something more to personalized counseling while allowing patients to make informed decisions.
