Fertility drugs can enhance the risk of womb cancer: Study

Jerusalem, December 14: Taking fertility drugs to increase ovulationdefine can actually have a dangerous consequence in the form of womb cancerdefine in later life, says a recent study.

According to the latest study done by scientists, women who take drugs in order to enhance their fertility are more prone to womb cancerdefine than those who do not resort to such medicines.

The results are based on the analysis of medical data of 15,000 women who gave birth 30 years ago.

According to statistics that came up after the study, out of the 567 women who were treated with any type of drug to increase ovulationdefine, five developed womb cancer. This is almost three times more than the figures regarding general population otherwise.

Also, the risk of developing womb cancer shot up to four times in 362 women who took a fertility drug called clomiphene. This drug basically makes the body produce more eggs by manipulating the function of oestrogen.

Clomiphene is one of the most widely used drugs as a treatment for couples who are not able to conceive when there seems to be no obvious medical problem. If this does not work, then women are administered hormonal injections that prompt the ovaries to produce a large number of eggs at once.

Another important revelation by the study is that fertility drugs are also related to increase in the risk of developing breast cancer, malignant skin cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Although these risks are smaller, they cannot be considered insignificant.

“This study didn’t include a detailed history of fertility drug use, and the number of women who developed uterine cancer was very small,” said Jodie Moffat of Cancer Research UK. She added that the samples size used in the study were too small to generalize the findings to the whole of the population.

But experts believe that the findings are important, since the breast cancer drug tamoxifendefine, which also acts in the same manner as clomiphene, also heightens the chances of womb cancer.

A spokesman for the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, which markets clomiphene, said, “This safety concern had already been debated by experts and so far no formal conclusion has been established.” He further said that the company was “committed to evaluating any new evidence and discussing with experts and healthcare authorities the appropriate information measures.”

The study team, which was led by Dr. Ronit Calderon-Margalit at Hadassah-Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had their findings published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.