Purpose: To characterize female pediatric and adolescent patients seen for fertility preservation consultation at an academic medical center and to describe the association between demographic or clinical factors and the use of fertility preservation treatment (FPT).
Methods: This is a retrospective chart analysis of female pediatric and adolescent patients seen for fertility preservation consultation at an academic fertility center over a 14-year period from 2005 to 2019.
Results: One hundred six females aged 3-21 years were seen for fertility preservation consultation with a mean age of 16.6 years. Diagnoses included hematologic malignancies (41.5%), gynecologic malignancies (9.4%), other malignancies (31.1%), non-malignant hematologic disease (14.2%), and non-malignant conditions (3.8%). Overall, 64.2% of subjects pursued fertility preservation, including oocyte cryopreservation (35.8%) and ovarian tissue cryopreservation (23.6%). Overall, age, minority race, diagnosis, time since diagnosis, and median household income were not significantly associated with odds of completing an FPT procedure. Among all patients, those who underwent gonadotoxic therapy prior to consultation had a lower odds of receiving FPT (OR= 0.24, 95% CI 0.10-0.55). Among patients without chemotherapy exposure, no factors were associated with FPT.
Conclusions: Among pediatric and adolescent patients at an academic center undergoing a fertility preservation consultation, there were no socioeconomic or clinical barriers to FPT use in those who had not yet undergone gonadotoxic therapy. The only factor that was negatively associated with odds of pursuing FPT was prior chemotherapy exposure.
Keywords: Gonadotoxic treatment; Ovarian tissue cryopreservation; Pediatric fertility preservation.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.