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October 15, 2007 NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Pregnant women who are cancer survivors may face an increased risk of certain complications, including bleeding after delivery and premature birth, according to a UK study. "The results are largely reassuring for women who have had cancer and are considering becoming pregnant or are pregnant, that they are not necessarily at higher risk during pregnancy and birth," Heather Clark of Aberdeen Maternity Hospital in Scotland, the study's first author, told Reuters Health via E-mail. "However, those caring for these women need to be aware of the potential areas of increased risk we found." Three in four people who develop cancer as children, adolescents or young adults will survive the disease, Clark and her team note in the October issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Increased survival, along with fertility treatment, mean that getting pregnant and having a child are now "real options" for many female cancer survivors, they add. To better understand the risks these women might face during pregnancy and childbirth, the researchers looked at 6,413 Scottish women who delivered their first child between 1980 and 2005; 917 of the women were cancer survivors. The cancer survivors were 29 years old when their children were born, on average, compared to an average age of 26 for women with no history of cancer. They were 56 percent more likely to hemorrhage after delivery and 33 percent more likely to require a C-section or assisted vaginal delivery with forceps or suction. Cancer survivors were also 33 percent more likely to deliver their infants before 37 weeks' gestation. "The increased risk of post-partum hemorrhage is surprising and we could find no possible biological mechanism for this in the scientific literature," Clark said. "The slightly increased risk of early delivery may be due to effects of radiation therapy -- for example, reduced uterine volume, which has been shown in earlier research." Interventions may have been more common for the cancer survivors because their health care providers saw them as being at greater risk of complications, she noted. "More research is needed to investigate these findings further, particularly as 'cancer' covers a wide spectrum of treatments and diagnoses, which, unfortunately, this study could not probe," Clark concluded. Copyright 2008 Reuters. Click for Restrictions.
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