Maternal and fetal outcomes of taxane chemotherapy in breast and ovarian cancer during pregnancy: case series and review of the literature
Annals of Oncology, 08/10/2012
Cardonick E et al. – Taxane-based chemotherapy does not appear to increase the risk of fetal or maternal complications when compared with conventional chemotherapy in the small cohort of women in our Registry.
Methods- This is a retrospective cohort study in which women were identified from the Cancer and Pregnancy Registry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center.
- A retrospective chart analysis and an independent t-test were carried out comparing patient outcomes.
- A literature search in Ovid, Medline and PubMed was then carried out using the terms ‘breast or ovarian cancer’, ‘pregnancy’, ‘paclitaxel’, ‘docetaxel’, ‘taxanes’ and ‘chemotherapy’.
- Twelve of 129 women with breast cancer were exposed to taxanes during pregnancy.
- Three of nine women with ovarian cancer received taxane-based treatment during pregnancy.
- Birth weight, gestational age at delivery, rate of growth restriction, congenital anomalies and incidence of maternal and neonatal neutropenia were not statistically different between the two groups.
