UTHealth Houston research: Children born to young men with cancer have slight increases in preterm birth, low-birth-weight children, but not birth defects

Male adolescents and young adults with cancer have a slightly elevated risk of having preterm birth and children with low birth weight, but no increased risk of birth defects in their offspring, according to research by UTHealth Houston.

The population-based study was recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers also found that the likelihood of live birth was highest for fathers who had thyroid cancer (27.6%) and lowest for those with gastrointestinal cancer (9.6%), at 10 years after diagnosis.

“There has been very little research on childbirth and perinatal research for adolescent and young adult men with cancer,” said lead author Caitlin Murphy, PhD, MPH, associate professor of health promotion and behavioral sciences with UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. “I hear often from adolescents and young adults in the community that fertility is the most important thing to them when they are facing a cancer diagnosis. It’s important to give them data-driven answers to their questions.”

The study used the Texas Cancer Registry, live birth certificates, and the Texas Birth Defects Registry to look at 42,896 adolescent and young men ages 15-39 diagnosed with cancer between Jan. 1, 1995, and Dec. 31, 2015. They were matched by age and race/ethnicity to adolescents and young men without cancer.

Preterm birth was 8.9% for adolescent and young men with cancer compared to 8% for men without cancer, and low birth weight was 6% in adolescents and men with cancer compared to 5.3% in those without cancer. There was no difference in the prevalence of birth defects.

Researchers concluded that the findings underscore the importance of reproductive counseling for adolescents and young adult men with cancer.

“There is a big push to offer counseling at the time of diagnosis related to fertility preservation, but as you can imagine, patients have just been diagnosed and are navigating their treatment, and now they have been told they need to make a decision about preserving fertility before they start chemotherapy,” Murphy said. “It’s overwhelming. We want care teams to expand the scope of the counseling they provide to include reproductive health in general and expand it beyond the day of diagnosis.”

Co-authors on the study from the School of Public Health were Jennifer S. Wang, MPH; Andrea C. Betts, PhD, MPH; L. Aubree Shay, PhD, MSSW; Marlyn A. Allicock, PhD, MPH; and Caroline L. Kirk, MPH, MHA. Funding came from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Cancer Control Research Training Program at the School of Public Health, supported by the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (T32CA057712).

Murphy has previously published research on the outcomes of children of adolescent and young adult women with cancer. She has also just received a $1.5 million grant to study pregnancy complications in a large, diverse population of adolescent and young adult women with cancer over a 30-year period.