Young women with breast cancer may be able to safely pause treatment to have a child, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Young women with breast cancer often state they’d like to have children at some point, yet after they’re treated their maintenance therapy may pose barriers. Now a study presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium shows that pausing therapy to have children is safe. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says that’s good news.

Nelson: Young women, still in reproductive age, with breast cancer, has always been a complicated aspect of the disease in terms of how you treat it, and quality of life.  Women who are treated for breast cancer may still have plans to potentially have children at some point in the future and all this is very important. Treating the primary breast cancer and using additional what we call adjuvant therapy has become a mainstay of breast cancer care. The question was could making additional allowances for having children be accommodated in breast cancer treatment without compromising its effectiveness and it looks like it probably can.  :34

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.