Sperm banking good for cancer patients

Sperm banking may not only preserve young cancer patients' ability to have children but also their emotional well-being. Infertility is a potential risk of chemotherapy. One option for men is cryopreservation - freezing and storing sperm - before chemotherapy so that their partners can later conceive through assisted reproduction. Since doctors can't predict which men will recover their normal sperm production after cancer treatment, it makes sense for all young patients to bank their sperms before beginning chemotherapy. Researchers from the Yokohama City University Medical Center, Japan, studied to see how sperm banking affected men's emotional well-being. They gave questionnaires to a group of patients whose sperm had been banked at their centre before chemotherapy. Most of the men were treated for testicular cancer, while the rest had leukaemia, lymphoma or other cancers. It was found that among 51 young men who banked their sperm before undergoing chemotherapy, 80 percent said that the move helped them in the emotional battle against cancer, and that they would recommend sperm banking to other men with the same disease. Even those who were unsure whether they wanted to have children in the future gained some peace of mind from sperm banking. All cancer specialists should inform patients about the potential reproductive side effects of treatment and about the option of sperm banking. However, the researchers stress that sperm banking is not the final answer to the problem of treatment-related infertility. One obstacle for some patients is the cost of freezing and storing sperm. Moreover, many men in the study still worried about becoming infertile, despite having banked their sperms. The above findings point to the importance of developing new chemotherapy protocols that are less of a threat to patients' fertility.