IVF early in life heightens breast cancer risk

Women who go opt for in vitro fertilization (IVF) early in life run a heightened risk of developing breast cancer as against women who don't undergo the treatment, findings of a new study suggest.

The findings, however, do not pose a significant increased risk and whether IVF contributed to the increased odds is also not clear, researchers clarified.

?I don?t think it's a huge increased risk that you should worry or panic (about),? study?s lead author, Louise Stewart, researcher at the University of Western Australia in Crawley said.

The study
For the new study, researchers at the University of Western Australia in Crawley collected information on 21,025 women between the ages of 20 and 40 years. All participants had gone through fertility treatments at the hospitals of Western Australia between 1983 and 2002.

The participants were tracked for a period of 16 years to see if they developed breast cancer.
Nearly 13,644 women took fertility drugs without IVF.

While 1.7 percent of the women who only had fertility drugs without IVF developed breast cancer by the end of the study, about 2 percent women who got fertility drugs and IVF developed breast cancer, researchers highlighted.
The risk, researchers highlighted, was not significant at all.

For the second phase, researchers divided the women into two different age groups; women who started taking fertility drugs before their 24th birthday and later opted for IVF and women who took fertility treatment at about 40 years, regardless of whether they had IVF or not

Researchers found that women in the first group were 56 percent more likely to develop breast cancer as against counterparts who only went through fertility treatments without IVF.

However, there was no increased risk of developing breast cancer among women who started fertility treatments only when they were about 40 years old, regardless of whether they ended up having IVF or not.

?The development of breast cancer is linked to estrogen exposure and the longer one is exposed, the greater the risk,? said Dr. Linda Giudice, president-elect of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.

?In an IVF cycle, there is a short, but significant elevation in circulating estrogen, and whether this is linked to the observations found in this study is not clear at this time,? Giudice said.

The findings of the study are published in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

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