Breast-Cancer Patients Under 40 May Keep Fertility With Drug, National Institute for Cancer Research Study Finds

Younger women with early-stage breast cancer who took a drug to suppress their ovaries were more likely to avert early menopause caused by chemotherapy, researchers found. The treatment, triptorelin, helped patients avoid the permanent loss of their fertility that can be prompted by chemotherapy’s toxic doses, according to research published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Two out of every five women under 40 who undergo chemotherapy for breast cancer lose the ability to conceive children, the researchers said. The use of triptorelin reduced the rate of early menopause by more than 17 percentage points, according to the results of a late-stage clinical trial called Promise-GIM6.