Breast cancer survivors can have healthy babies and good long-term health

CANCER DIGEST – Dec. 12, 2021 – Women of childbearing age who have survived breast cancer are less likely to get pregnant than non-cancer women, but when they do, they are just as likely to have healthy babies, according to a study presented at the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

The study was a meta-analysis that combined data from 39 studies that involved 114,573 breast cancer patients. It was presented at this year’s conference by Matteo Lambertini MD, PhD, adjunct professor in medical oncology at the University of Genova, Italy.
In their analysis the researchers compared women from the general population to the women in the studies who had survived breast cancer. They found that the cancer survivors had a 60 percent lower chance of becoming pregnant than the non-cancer women of the same age.

Lambertini said the study did not look into the cause of reduced pregnancy and so it is not known if the lower rate of pregnancy was due to the cancer survivors choosing not to try to become pregnant or due to other causes.

When the researchers compared the cancer survivors who did become pregnant, however, they found the cancer survivors were 50 percent more likely to have a low-birth-weight baby and had a 6 percent higher risk of having a baby that was small for gestational age. They also had a 45 percent higher risk of preterm labor; and 14 percent higher risk of having a caesarean section. The increased risk of low birth weight and small gestational age appeared to be restricted to women who had received prior chemotherapy.

On the plus side, there was no significant increased risk of congenital defects or other pregnancy or delivery complications. In addition, compared with breast cancer patients who did not have a subsequent pregnancy, those who did get pregnant had a 44 percent reduced risk of death and a 27 percent reduced risk of disease recurrence.

The analysis also showed that pregnancy appeared safe regardless of whether the women were positive for BRCA, or if the cancer has spread to lymph nodes, or whether they had previous chemotherapy exposure. Also the amount of time between breast cancer diagnosis and pregnancy did not affect pregnancy outcomes.

The authors concluded that physicians should more closely monitor pregnant breast cancer survivors compared with pregnant healthy women, but the lack of negative effects on survival indicate that many women can successfully go through pregnancy after breast cancer.