An announcement was made last Monday at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Congress: a new study has just confirmed the “slight increase in the risk of ovarian cancer in women having undergone IVF – of the order of one-third (37%)”.
This worrying question is raised time and time again but “there does not appear to be a consensus from the scientific world”. Scientists remain cautious and will not comment on causality links. They carried out a study in the United Kingdom focusing on 255,000 patients followed up between 1991 and 2010. Apart from concluding that “the risk of ovarian cancer is slightly increased in women who have undergone IVF”,the authors stated that “the younger the women who undergo ovarian treatment, the greater the risk”.
For Doctor François Olivenne, obstetric gynaecologist at the centre de FIV Eylau-La Muette (IVF Centre) (Paris), these studies are insufficient because “they do not specify the number of patients or treatment type and dose, etc.”Ovarian stimulation practices vary from one centre to the next because, “in fact, no reasonable limit has been established”, he admitted: “eight treatment cycles are already considered to be a lot, especially if the stimulation is strong. However, in reality, there is no scientific basis for this”.
Pourquoi Docteur (21/10/2015)