The study by Norwegian scientists has found that for almost all types of cancer, the survival of women who are diagnosed during pregnancy or who became pregnant after being treated for the disease is no different from that of other female cancer patients. It may be more difficult to diagnose breast cancer during lactation because many women get lumps due to mastitis and because normal physiological changes in the breast might mask suspicious developments,’ Dr Stensheim added. In the study, the scientists tracked the cancer of 45,511 women for an average of eight years and compared the survival rates of patients who did not get pregnant with those of patients who either were diagnosed during the gestation or lactation period, or who got pregnant after cancer diagnosis and treatment. There have been several hypotheses for decades proposing that complex hormonal changes and immunologic alterations associated with pregnancy might promote cancer growth,” Dr Stensheim said. While previous studies on cancer during pregnancy tended to investigate a single cancer type and draw information from a single institution, the latest study is population-based and includes all cancer types found in Norwegian women diagnosed between 1967 and 2004 and is thus among the broadest studies of its type to date. read more

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