According to a presentation at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress, chemotherapy administered during pregnancy does not appear to cause problems in child cognitive development, nor in their cardiac development.
The presentation, based on research from Belgium, Holland and the Czech Republic, is the first of its kind to examine and monitor children between the ages of 18 months and 18 years old whose mothers received chemotherapy while pregnant.
In all, the study followed 68 mothers who delivered 70 children. The mothers were diagnosed with several different cancers, although most prominent among them was breast cancer, which accounted for about half of all cases.
The researchers concluded that "children who were prenatally exposed to chemotherapy seem to do as well as children in the general population, and, that the treatment does not influence the development of mental processes or the functioning of the heart."
However—of the 70 children born, 47 of them were delivered pre-term. Of those, 7 had a gestational age of just 28-32 weeks, 9 of them, 32-34 weeks, and 31 of them, 34-37 weeks. Researchers concluded that, among the children that did appear to suffer from cognitive issues, this was a result of being born pre-term and not as a consequence of the chemotherapy.
The question then might be whether the chemotherapy were somehow complicit in causing women to give birth pre-term—an issue which, according to head researcher professor Frederic Amant, was not clear from their findings.
Said professor Amant, "At this stage we do not know the full, long-term consequences of prenatal chemotherapy, including its effect on the children's fertility and likelihood of developing cancers when they are older. For this reason, we are continuing this international collaboration to follow-up more children for longer periods of time."
Source: Medical News Today
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