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Is there anything women should know about preserving fertility when undergoing treatment for AML?
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• November 16, 2022
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Is there anything women should know about preserving fertility when undergoing treatment for AML? When someone's diagnosed with AML, it is very overwhelming and just understanding what leukemia is, the kind of treatments, the options, your combining targeted treatments, you know, the possible need for transplant. It is so much information that a lot of women are going to feel like a tsunami of information has hit them and it is very difficult to make even decisions. Several of my very young patients who are like in their 20s, they're just so shocked at the fact that they have AML. And when I bring up the fertility question, it's a question which is unfair. You know, a 20-year-old might have not even thought at this moment whether they're going to have children, they're not going to have children, they may not have a partner, they have not thought of anything. So they many times just say, just get rid of the leukemia, you know, just get me better and then I'll deal with it later. And you kind of have to sometimes drive them back home to the point saying, you know, these are decisions that are hard, but we have to make it now because here is, you know, here are, to make it now or just immediately after going through induction and just before transplant, within a month we have to decide what we need to do about fertility because once, hopefully when they're cured and they have, you know, five years from now, you're going to think back about that decision and say, I wish I had, you know, made a different decision. So it is important that when fertility questions come up, they listen and it's actually very important for family members to be around. We feel inherently uncomfortable talking about fertility, you know, with your parents around or things like that, but it's important that family members are around to discuss what it means because they generally have a bigger view of things. These are for very young patients. Obviously there are mature adult women who can quickly grab to the fact that I have to do something about it. But it's very important that any young patient who is in the reproductive age and who wants to have children in the future, if their doctors have not brought up the point of fertility preservation either ways, either in the form of medications to sort of keep the ovaries sleeping through the chemotherapy or egg retrieval and ovarian tissue preservation, they should bring this up right at the beginning because the decision point is when you're diagnosed, whether you want to go for egg retrieval now or not. And it's not just about whether you want to or not. Sometimes you just can't because of the nature of the disease. So a lot of this information has to be discussed with the patient and women should ask, you know, will this and they believe me, 95% of women that I treat don't ask me that question. I bring it up to them. They are just so overwhelmed with this. They don't even know that they should ask about fertility. They're not aware that this might impact their fertility in the future. So they will never ask. So this is one thing I always encourage and bring it out that ask your doctor this question. I mean, I will bring it up always, but it's possible in the heat of the moment. That's the last thing someone thinks about.

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