ESHRE 2018: Risk of Prostate Cancer in Men Treated With Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection
Posted: Monday, July 23, 2018
Compared with men who conceived naturally, an increased risk of prostate cancer has been found in subfertile men who were treated with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), according to a large register study in Sweden of nearly 1.2 million fathers. However, the risk does not seem to be related to ICSI itself but rather to the male patients’ subfertility. These findings were reported at the 2018 European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Barcelona (Abstract O-191).
“The results show immense risk for early-onset prostate cancer,” stated study author Yahia Al-Jebari, of the Lund University, Sweden, in an ESHRE press release. The researchers described this form of cancer as “generally considered more aggressive.”
This register study, which contained data from the Swedish Medical Birth Register, the Swedish Cancer Registry, and the Swedish Quality Register for Assisted Reproduction, identified almost 1.2 fathers and their first child born in Sweden between 1994 and 2014. Of these fathers, 14,882 had undergone ICSI, and 20,618 had undergone in vitro fertilization.
Among all of the fathers, 3,211 cases of prostate cancer were identified. Those who had ICSI had a higher risk of prostate cancer (at any age) than did those who became fathers by natural conception (control group; hazard ratio = 1.47). In contrast, those who had in vitro fertilization did not have an increased risk of prostate cancer compared with the control group (hazard ratio = 1.14).
When the investigators focused on age, fathers who had conceived through ICSI had a higher risk for early-onset prostate cancer (before age 50) but not for late-onset prostate cancer compared with controls. As for fathers who had conceived through in vitro fertilization, no increased risk for early-onset prostate cancer was detected.
