Fertility drug connection???

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Question:  I went through 3 lots of egg donation for somebody very close to me and then was diagnosed with breast cancer probably around 2 years later.  The breast cancer was NOT hormonal, it was HER2+ - does this mean that the drugs I took for the egg donation could still possibly have caused my breast cancer even though it was not hormone positive?  Or could this be just one of those things.  Just wondering ...

Studies seem to indicate they are NOT a risk

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-04/aaf...

Hello, I would like to have more information on this.

Thank you.

Alicia

I too took clomid. I think there is a connection when Dx'd with er+ BC. Fertility is BIG business. They're not ready on own this one. Imagine the law suits- which I've read there are some on-going.

Oh there's definitely a connection.

I have had loads and loads of IVF. Probably around 15 rounds of IVF with fresh embryos. I've also had several frozen embryos and that requires that you take oestrogen for several months even after the pregnancy is established. I had my last child in 2014, via IVF. I was then due to have one final child with our frozen embryos. I had two goes with the full whammy of oestrogen and progesterone but both pregnancies ended in the first trimester. I was then due to have one final go in Feb of this year but just based on a gut instinct of things not being right I had a memmo and lobular carcimona in situ was found. I met with a professor from one of the best cancer hospitals in the UK and his feeling was that fertility drugs are definitely causal in BC but it may be a few years yet before research publishes that definitively.

Or perhaps the infertility(or what caused it,perhaps not fully understood) is the culprit & not the drugs. I did go through infertility treatments.

Hello. I'm new here and your post poses one of the first questions I asked my oncologist after being told I needed chemo.

I did one round of IUI followed by IVF in my late 30s. Subchorionic hematoma at 12 weeks forced the extended use of progesterone and estrogen to maintain the pregnancy. I was P/E+ at BC diagnosis. Also on birth control for many years to control heavy bleeding, clotting and fibroids.

So, my oncologist said personally, he believes there is certainly a connection; however,no studies have shown the connection but he claims it's due to changes in IVF processes, including hormone regimens. The pharma companies change their drugs every five years or so and finding a group of women who used the same drug regimen and also got BC years later makes for difficult study group formation.

While I imagine we will all say fertility treatments were worth it in the end, I wonder how we'd approach treatment if it's ever shown there is a link. I believe more vigilance is usually a good thing.

The fertility drug Clomid is an anti-estrogen (think, tamoxifen) that reduces estrogen action, thus allowing increases in the pituitary hormones (LH/FSH) responsible for developing the follicles that will ovulate. Moreover, pregnancy and # of pregnancies is shown to reduce BC risk.

The estrogen/progesterone injections necessary to maintain a difficult pregnancy in pre-menopausal women are short-term and have not been shown to be linked to breast cancer in the long-term:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2363045/

More worrisome is the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study that showed menopausal women on long term oral estrogen+progesterone are more likely to get BC than control group or estrogen-only.

So IMO, I don't think infertility treatment per se is causing BC. BUT, hormones aren't innocuous and links with BC have been shown, particularly in older women.