While cancer during pregnancy is considered rare-only 1 in every 1,000 women gets diagnosed-it still happens, and the illness and the treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation are enough to scare pregnant women, especially on their supposed harmful effects to the fetus. Thus, rather than go through with the treatment while still being pregnant, they usually wait until they have given birth. By the time this happens, the cancer may have already spread.
New small studies, however, suggest that such fears are unfounded-that is, usual cancer treatment protocols are safe for both mothers and the unborn baby.
In an article published in WebMD on Thursday, October 2, two new studies prove the non-effect of conventional cancer treatments on children. These were later presented in a Madrid meeting among European Society for Medical Oncology.
In the first study, lead author Dr. Frederic Amant from Belgium's University Hospitals Leuven evaluated more than 35 children with an average age of 2 years old whose mothers had undergone chemotherapy treatment while pregnant. According to their results, they did not found any serious health issues pertaining to such treatments even if they were administered during the first 3 months of the pregnancy, a crucial time for fetal development.
For the second study, Amant and his team focused on the effects of radiation therapy on children. More than 5 adults and 15 children participated in the study. Just like in their first study, they concluded that radiation therapy didn't have any mental, social, physical, or behavioral effect on these children.
While the small studies have to undergo peer review, Amant and his colleagues believed that in general suffering from cancer while pregnant should not be a reason not to seek treatment or for doctors to advise pregnancy termination or treatment delay to their patients.
Meanwhile, in 2012, an article written by Stacy Simon for Cancer.org already mentioned other studies that supported the findings of the recent ones. In one study, the European researchers looked into the health profile of 70 children whose mothers underwent chemotherapy during the second to the last trimesters of their pregnancy and discovered the treatment didn't have any health effects on the children. While some had delivered their babies prematurely, they didn't attribute it to cancer treatments as others had carried their babies to full term.
