Women who get chemotherapy treatment with a common drug combination were found to have more young eggs in their ovaries post-treatment. New research indicates that chemotherapy treatment could contribute to this situation.

The research was conducted by specialists from the University of Edinburgh on a small sample of women and could not postulate that the results of the study represent a general situation.

Common Chemotherapy Treatment Offers Fertility Boost

The research was published in the journal Human Reproduction, and it was supported by the Medical Research Council.

As part of the small group of study, 14 women who had undergone chemotherapy and 12 healthy women donated samples of ovary tissues. The ovaries from eight of the women who had cancer had a much greater incidence of immature, non-growing eggs compared to their healthy counterparts and to the women who received different chemotherapy treatment.

The eight women who scored so high in these tests were administered a drug combination named ABVD, an abbreviation of the four drugs it incorporates: adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine. The treatment may have contributed to the higher incidence of young eggs. Consequently, the ovary tissues looked healthy, as it appeared to be very similar to the ones in the control group.

The therapy, which is believed to produce this situation, was administered as a treatment to Hodgkin's lymphoma. However, the conclusions of this study are not to be taken generally.

"This study involves only a few patients, but its findings were consistent and its outcome may be significant and far-reaching. We need to know more about how this drug combination acts on the ovaries, and the implications of this," noted Professor Evelyn Telfer, author of the study and professor of biological sciences.

Chemotherapy Effects On Conception

This correlation should be subjected to further scientific analysis, especially since a previous research showed that ovarian cancer develops resistance to chemotherapy, being one of the most difficult to treat.

"Most patients will respond to it at first, but everybody develops chemoresistance," noted J. Rebecca Liu from the University of Michigan.

The idea that chemotherapy could actually improve the rate of young eggs in women would be groundbreaking if proven true.

Prior studies analyzing the effects of chemotherapy discovered that it actually increases the infertility rates in women. As a result to this discovery, stem cells were involved in helping women who survived cancer conceive.

If this type of chemotherapy treatment could actually stimulate fertility in women, other chemotherapy treatments could also be modified to diminish the post-treatment infertility rates.