On February 18th, Reuters reported a new study that is a relief to many patients struggling with infertility, and considering doing IVF. It is the concern that doing IVF could someday increase their risks of getting cancer.
As reported by Reuters: “Women getting fertility treatments can be reassured that in vitro fertilization (IVF) does not increase their risk of breast and gynecological cancers, according to a U.S. study of Israeli women. 
‘The findings were fairly reassuring. Nothing was significantly elevated’ said lead author Louise Brinton, chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland.
Since I began my career as a fertility advocate, the concerns about getting cancer from fertility ovulation medications have been a shadow of fear for so many patients, and constant place of inquiry for reporters and the media. It has been an implied fear for years, never with any good studies linking fertility medications for getting cancer.
The relationship between infertility, infertility treatment, cancer, and the patient who shows up with infertility in the first place has been difficult to tease apart. It is hard to know why people get cancer, and some experts have even wondered if being childless is itself a risk for cancer or the fact that the woman is infertile could be an underlying cause.
And in the over 20 years that I have spent as a patient advocate in the field in fertility, there hasn’t been many women who developed cancer after fertility treatment included in studies.
“We all want answers, but it’s a very difficult exposure to study, particularly when we don’t have the numbers we would really like,” Brinton, whose results appeared in the journal Fertility & Sterility, told Reuters Health.
She and her colleagues examined the medical records of 67,608 women who underwent IVF treatments between 1994 and 2011 and 19,795 women who sought treatment but never received IVF.
The researchers linked those files to a national cancer registry and found 1,509 of them had been diagnosed with cancer through mid-2011.
There was no difference in women’s chances of being diagnosed with breast or endometrial cancer based on whether they were treated with IVF. The researchers did find that a woman’s risk of ovarian cancer slightly increased the more rounds of treatment she received, but that finding could have been due to chance.
Brinton said her study was too small conclusively link IVF and ovarian cancer – and that it remained very rare, with 45 cases in the entire study.
A similar association was found in a study headed by Bengt Kallen, director of the Tornblad Institute at Lund University, Sweden, who said that any increased ovarian cancer risk might be due to the dysfunctional ovaries themselves.
“Infertile women have a primary problem with their ovaries and IVF has nothing to do with it,” Kallen told Reuters Health. “It’s a rather difficult thing to disentangle if there is an effect from the hormones or from the IVF procedure.”
Others warned of biases that may make the results of studies like this difficult to interpret, noting that women undergoing IVF are watched very closely, which would likely increase the chance that ovarian cancers are detected.
(Reporting from New York by Trevor Stokes at Reuters Health, Editing by Pamela Madsen)