About a quarter of the nearly 285,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer in the U.S. each year have not gone through menopause.
Some chemotherapy and hormone therapy drugs that treat breast cancer can cause permanent or temporary infertility or early menopause. Women who haven’t yet gone through menopause should use birth control while having these treatments, because some chemotherapy drugs are linked with birth defects.
Chemotherapy-induced menopause happens in 10% to 50% of women younger than 40 and in 50% to 94% of women over 40. After chemotherapy, you may have months or even years of uneven ovarian function.
Radiation therapy won’t cause infertility unless it is directed at both ovaries. Depending on the type and extent of the breast cancer, your ovaries may be surgically removed or radiated to lower the amount of estrogen that your body makes. This will cause permanent infertility.
Women with breast cancer who want to start or expand a family later on should consider options to keep fertility before beginning treatment. These include:
Freezing eggs or embryos.
Freezing ovarian tissue. In 1999, for the first time, reimplanting previously frozen ovarian tissue restored a woman’s ovarian function. It’s not widely available, but this technique doesn’t require ovarian stimulation.
Egg donation. You can get eggs from a donor that are fertilized and implanted after cancer treatment.
Hormonal suppression of the reproductive organs. This approach involves using hormones to put your reproductive organs in a dormant (inactive) state. It seems to protect the cells that develop into eggs (germ cells) from damage by chemotherapy. This approach is still being investigated.
