Cancer treatment during pregnancy saves lives, data shows — SkimNews
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- Elyce Cardonick treated pregnant women with ovarian cancer differently based on their doctors' approaches, observing that timely chemotherapy during pregnancy was linked to better maternal survival.
- Pregnant women with cancer are frequently advised to terminate pregnancies or deliver early, despite research showing no survival benefit from ending the pregnancy.
- Children exposed to chemotherapy in utero perform similarly to unexposed peers on developmental tests through adolescence, though they are three times more likely to need eyeglasses.
- Children delivered preterm to avoid chemotherapy show worse developmental outcomes than those treated in utero and carried to term.
- Elyce Cardonick co-developed clinical guidelines with the Society of Maternal Fetal Medicine and the American Society of Clinical Oncology to standardize cancer treatment during pregnancy.
- The Cancer and Pregnancy Registry, founded by Cardonick, has collected 650 cases to inform best practices for managing cancer in pregnant patients.
Why it matters: Pregnant cancer patients face unnecessary risks when doctors delay treatment due to unfounded fears, but evidence shows survival rates match non-pregnant patients when treated appropriately—changing practice could save mothers without sacrificing infant outcomes, and the registry’s data directly supports safer decision-making.
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