Pregnancy after autologous bone marrow transplantation for malignant lymphomas.

Abstract

In the present paper, we report two cases of normal pregnancy after high dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in two of the 72 women belonging to a group of 188 patients transplanted in our unit for advanced malignant lymphoma. These pregnancies occurred 19 and 33 months after high dose therapy in two women aged 27 and 28, neither of whom had received previous total body irradiation or pelvic radiotherapy. There are several reasons for the relatively low frequency of pregnancies after ASCT. In particular, the median age of the patients is 35 years, most of these women are transplanted in relapse and have received previous pretreatment with alkylating agents and the disease free survival rate does not exceed 40%. The preservation of long term fertility should be taken into account when deciding therapeutic options for young women with curable disease.