Fertility Sparing Treatments in Young Patients with Gynecological Cancers: Iranian Experience and Literature Review

With increase in the marriage age some women experience gynecological cancers before giving birth. Thus fertility sparing in these patients is an important point and much work has been done on conservative management. We here report our experience on fertility sparing with cervical, endometrial and ovarian cancers and include a review of the literature. With cervical cancer, radical trachelectomy with para-aortic and pelvic lymphadenectomy can be performed in patients with early stage IA1-IB cancers, because they have low recurrence rates. The complications are fewer than with radical hysterectomy. For endometrial cancer, the accepted treatment is total abdominal hysterectomy+ bilateral salpango-oopherectomy (TAH+BSO), but in young patients with early stage 1 lesions, we can suggest use of hormonal therapy in place of radical surgery if we evaluate with MRI and the result is early stage disease without the other site involvement and the grade of tumor is well differentiated. GNRH analog, oral medroxyprogestrone acetate (MPA), 100-800 mg/day , megestrol acetate 40-160 mg/day and combination of tamoxifen and a progestin have been applied, but we must remember, they should underwent repeated curettage for investigating medical outcome after 3 months. With normal pathology we follow medical therapy for 3 months and can evaluate for infertility treatment. The best option for patients who treated by medical therapy is TAH+BSO after normal term pregnancy. With ovarian cancer, there is much experience on fertility sparing surgery and in Iran conservative surgical management in young patients with stage I (grade 1,2) of epithelial ovarian tumor and sex cord-stromal tumor and patients with borderline and germ cell ovarian tumors is being successfully performed.