1. Why Should You Care?
If you are Caucasian, between the ages of 20 and 39, you may be in the high-risk category of testicular cancer. Are you are one of those individuals diagnosed with testicular cancer? Is your doctor planning to treat you with chemotherapy, surgery or radiation? If you want to have children, you may want to seek your doctor's advice. You may want to know how your treatment affects your fertility.
2. How Is Testicular Cancer Treated?
Depending on the type and degree of your testicular cancer, your doctor may use surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. Most often, in over 95 percent of cases, testicular cancer can be cured. Early detection offers the best possible chance of treatment. A group of testicular cancer called nonseminomas tend to be aggressive whereas seminomas are more sensitive to radiation. And the side effects of treatment differ from patient to patient.
3. How Does Testicular Cancer Treatment Affect Fertility?
If your doctor decides to remove a testicle, you might be concerned about losing your ability to produce children. Men with one healthy testicle can still have a normal erection and produce sperm. However, if the surgery entails removal of some of the deep-seated lymph nodes inside your abdomen, it is possible that it can lead to problems with fertility. You should talk to your doctor to see if there is a chance of using nerve-sparing surgery that may preserve the ability to ejaculate normally. Also, radiation therapy interferes with sperm production, but many patients regain their fertility over a period of one to two years. Even a few anti-cancer drugs interfere with sperm production. Some patients might respond with a reduction in sperm count but many others recover their fertility.
4. How to Overcome Fertility Issues?
It may be a good idea to discuss your concerns about sexual function and fertility with your doctor once you have been diagnosed with testicular cancer. Some men with testicular cancer have fertility issues even before they are diagnosed or treated. It might make sense to go in for sperm banking to have a back-up copy of your genetic material just in case treatment might lead to infertility. Sperm banking entails freezing your sperm for a future need.
5. Treatment Options for the Infertile Male with Cancer
Advances in assisted reproductive techniques can mimic human reproductive processes outside of the body. For instance, specialists can inject a single sperm into an egg using a technique called In Vitro Fertilization (IVF-ICSI). It requires you to put away very little of your sperm in the deep freeze. It can be relied upon should your partner choose to become pregnant again. Similarly, in some men with sperm disorders following chemo, successful sperm retrieval using testicular sperm extraction combined with IVF-ICSI can be accomplished. In fact, there are techniques that can potentially restore fertility in patients who have received radiation or chemotherapy.
