Can I have children if I have early kidney cancer?

According to a study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center, egg freezing is a very good option for female cancer patients who want to preserve their fertility before chemotherapy. For couples, embryo freezing is still the preferred method, and for young patients, freezing eggs or embryos has a 50 % chance of having a baby.

Although patients can choose to cryopreserve embryos, oocytes, or ovarian tissue, oocyte cryopreservation is the most popular and offers many advantages, including increased reproductive autonomy and reduced moral, personal, and religious dilemmas.

The official guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine ( ASRM) emphasize that embryo freezing has a higher pregnancy rate and say it may be a more reliable option. However, for single women, creating embryos is often impossible unless donated sperm is used. For such patients, freezing eggs is a reasonable option to preserve fertility.

The NYU study involved 231 cancer patients with an average age of 31 years who were admitted to the center from 2005 to 2014. The most common cancers were breast cancer (84 invasive and 15 ductal carcinoma in situ), followed by gynecological (39 ovarian cancers, 18 cervical cancers, 11 uterine cancers, 2 vaginal cancers, and 1 vulvar cancer), hematology (27 Hodgkin's, 6 non-Hodgkin's, and 9 leukemias), and others (10 central nervous system, 6 gastrointestinal, and 3 genitourinary).

As expected, the mean age was highest in patients with breast cancer ( 35 years) and lowest in patients with hematological cancer (24 years). An average of 18 oocytes were retrieved and 15 were cryopreserved; however, the type of cancer affected the yield.