Fertility drugs don't add to ovarian cancer risk, study shows

The world's first 'test tube baby' Britain's Louise Brown (R) listens as Professor Robert Edwards addresses the media during 25th anniversary celebrations of the revolutionary fertility treatment 'In Vitro Fertilization' ( IVF) at Bourne Hall in Cambridgeshire in this July 26, 2003 file photo. (STRINGER)

Despite lingering concerns that using fertility drugs might raise a woman's chances for later developing ovarian cancer, new research suggests the drugs don't contribute any added risk.

"One important message is women who need to use fertility drugs to get pregnant should not worry about using these fertility drugs," said Dr. Albert Asante, lead author of the study and a clinical fellow in the division of reproductive endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Research on fertility drugs and cancer risk has yielded conflicting results. Some studies, especially in the 1990s, showed an increased likelihood of the cancer among women who took fertility drugs. And a Dutch report from 2011 found an increase in borderline tumors -- those with abnormal cells that might not turn into cancer.

However, Dr. Bert Scoccia, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Medicine in Chicago who studies fertility medication and cancer, said numerous other studies have found no increased risk for women who take fertility boosting medications.

The majority of studies have pointed to fertility drugs being safe, but many of them were conducted outside the U.S., Asante noted. "It's difficult to translate what those findings mean for women in the U.S.," he told Reuters Health. So Asante and his colleagues gathered medical information on 1900 women from an ongoing ovarian cancer study at the Mayo

The researchers compared 1,028 women with ovarian cancer to 872 women of similar age who did not have cancer.

About 24 percent of the women who did not have ovarian cancer reported having used fertility drugs, while roughly 17 percent of women who had ovarian cancer had used fertility drugs, the team reports in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility.

After taking into account factors that can influence the risk for ovarian cancer, such as age and use of the birth control pill, the researchers found no difference in cancer rates between the groups. "That is reassuring," said Scoccia, who was not involved in the research.Scoccia said it's possible that the type of fertility drugs women used decades ago could explain why some earlier studies had found opposite results.

"Unfortunately, because the patients (in this study) were providing the information in a questionnaire, we don't know what drugs they took. Nevertheless...there was no increased risk in ovarian cancer," said Scoccia.

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Fertility drugs don't add to ovarian cancer risk, study shows