The goal of the Fertility Preservation Program at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center is to protect the fertility of patients being treated for cancer or blood disorders. Learn more about fertility preservation options for male pediatric patients .
Yeah, Fertility preservation is our effort here at Dana Farber Boston Children's Hospital to maintain fertility and our patients who are seeing treatment for either cancer or blood disorder. Sometimes the treatments that they receive can only temporarily affect their ability to produce sperm. But in other cases they'll receive treatments that are much stronger and that can affect it In the long run, Chemotherapy, radiation and surgery can all play a part. And since so many Children now survive cancer, this has become, thankfully, an important issue that we need to address. So we offer navigation through this somewhat complicated process. The goal of our program is to meet with all of our families and new patients before starting treatment. We discuss how the treatments that we expect to use for their son or daughter may or may not affect fertility in the future. If we think that there is going to be in effect, we can talk about options for preserving fertility before treatment even begins. Once we've had the discussion with the family and we're clear about whether they're interested in proceeding, we take over and activate the team that will be necessary to make all of this happened in short order. The fertility preservation team includes the oncology specialists, specialists from urology and reproductive endocrinology. The options we have available for our male patients include sperm banking, testicular sperm extraction and testicular tissue cryopreservation. Sperm banking is a great option for boys that are able to self stimulate to produce a semen sample. But if they can't, UM, there are options that are available, including extracting the sperm from the testicle. For Children that have not reached the age of puberty and do not produce sperm, testicular tissue biopsy and banking is an option for them. We feel that there is a potential for the tissue to be used in the future to help with sperm generation. Our goal is to help parents find the best fertility preservation option for their Children so that their Children can have families of their own in the future. We definitely want to address the issue before treatment starts, but there are certainly other times where fertility preservation might come up and should be revisited. For example, anytime during treatment where something changes, a new medication is introduced or a patient moves on to a different type of treatment. This program is really about the future and really about giving a child the full life that they can have after cancer treatment.
