Word: cancer
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...there have been no long-term medical studies of donors. But fertility doctors agree that a lot can be gleaned from the smattering of studies of long-term risks for infertility patients, who receive the same protocol for ovarian stimulation and retrieval as donors. The primary health concern is cancer, and studies assessing cancer rates among infertility patients have drawn conflicting results. Many such studies are hobbled by small sample groups, or are too short term. The most extensive study to date, published in February in the American Journal of Epidemiology, used historical data from women who gave birth...
...Right now egg donors are treated like vendors, not as patients. Patients need to be followed up," says internist Jennifer Schneider, who has been advocating for the government to track egg donors since 2007, a few years after her daughter, a three-time egg donor, died of colon cancer at age 31. "After the first few days of being discharged from the IVF clinic and seeing that there were no immediate consequences, they are never contacted again...
...studies like this establish only an association, not a cause; fertility doctors note that infertility itself is associated with elevated risks of uterine cancer. "It's hard to say if the cancer was caused by the disease, the treatment of the disease or some combination of the two," says Elizabeth Ginsburg, a fertility doctor and president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology...
...Reproductive-health advocates respond by calling for a study of egg donors, who could also serve as a natural control group for a study of cancer in women who are treated for infertility. Another long-standing question among doctors and donors is whether egg donation affects future fertility, says Schneider, who has conducted a survey of 155 egg donors and heard several reports of fertility problems among women post-donation. Schneider concedes that her poll was too informal and small to lead to any conclusions and suggests that a larger, national study be undertaken...
...million adults falling under its label, obesity has reached crisis levels in the United States. Perhaps most alarmingly, 12.5 million children are overweight, putting them at an increased risk for a host of diseases in adulthood, including diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, and certain forms of cancer. These risks do not affect personal health alone—the costs of obesity to the U.S. economy have been estimated at over a hundred billion dollars...