Cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy often cause substantial loss of the cells responsible for creating sperm, meaning they can cause patients to become infertile.
The growing success of these cancer therapies means that many patients who may be pre-pubescent children when they are treated for cancer now live to an age where they would like to start a family. This means fertility preservation is an incredibly important factor to consider between cancer diagnosis and the initiation of treatment.
Male patients who have been diagnosed with cancer are offered the choice of freezing their sperm before their treatment so that they have the option to become parents later in life. Despite the consensus that fertility preservation is known to be important for cancer survivors' quality of life, there has been no way up until now of preserving the fertility of pre-pubescent male patients, as they do not produce any sperm for freezing.
The MRC Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh has pioneered a new technique which involves the preservation of testicular tissue, and therefore sperm-producing germ cells, before cancer treatment. They are currently seeking approval for a clinical trial (see BioNews 1023). As the patients who may benefit from this technique are very young, the option of having this treatment may be confusing and intimidating, and so the team has developed an educational resource for their patients in the form of an animation called 'Will I be able to have children after cancer treatment?'.
The Centre worked alongside the charity Children with Cancer UK to discover young patients' common questions about fertility preservation. The video aims to answer these questions as well as providing a description of the Centre's ongoing fertility preservation research for pre-pubescent male cancer patients.
The animation is structured as a Q&A between a child and an adult in order to make it more accessible to a younger audience. This format allows the animation to cover many aspects of fertility and its preservation. Since a child is asking the questions in this video, it imitates the questions that a younger patient may be wondering themselves. The answers to these questions are simplified due to the target audience but still include enough detail for children to gain a primary understanding of fertility and the treatments that may be offered to them in order to preserve it for their older selves.
An explanation of how fertility relates to your ability to conceive a biological child starts the animation off, which helps relay the significance of its preservation to an audience which will likely have never thought about having children. The animation goes on to discuss the process of the new preservation treatment and how it could allow them to become biological parents in the future, either through reimplantation of their tissue or by using the tissue to produce sperm outside of the body.
This animation serves to break down the communication barrier faced by young patients who may not fully understand the complex treatments available to them by providing a relatively comprehensive and engaging resource that can be easily distributed and understood by many age-groups. While it is aimed at pre-pubescent patients I think the information presented in the video could also be used by male patients old enough to freeze sperm as it covers some questions they may have.
As with any short educational video it should be used in conjunction with more detailed supplementary materials in order to make an informed decision. It could also serve as a valuable resource for parents and other members of the child's support network who are perhaps uncertain of a place to start when discussing such a challenging topic with them.
This animation and its discussion of how pre-pubescent male patients may now be able to have biological children after surviving cancer will surely be a great source of hope for them and their families. Up until now they have had to grapple with the difficult concept of permanent infertility and the implications of this. The animation provides an excellent and digestible introduction to not only what fertility is but what this treatment could mean for them.
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