Grant: Project Grant

Life-saving cancer treatments for children can lead to serious long term health problems in their adulthood. Girls who survived cancer are at a high risk of menopause before age 40, which greatly reduces their chance of being a mother. Faced with expensive and invasive fertility preservation technology, survivors and their doctors are in need of risk assessment tools that can put survivors into low, moderate and high risk groups. The low risk group can avoid the unnecessary fertility treatments while the high risk group can get counseling to make decisions regarding fertility treatments. We will create such a tool for female childhood cancer survivors using data from the largest childhood cancer survivor cohort in the world; it includes over 11000 female survivors treated over three decades in the US and Canada. Our risk calculator will be made available through web and mobile app. The ultimate goal of our research project is to improve the quality of life of childhood cancer survivors in their adulthood.