Women who manage to conceive after surviving childhood cancer may encounter treatment-related pregnancy and labor complications if they got radiation for their malignancies, a recent study suggests.
Female cancer survivors who got abdominal radiation are more than three times more likely to develop diabetes during pregnancy as their peers who received different tumor treatments, the study found. After radiation, these cancer survivors are also more than twice as likely to develop anemia during pregnancy.
Survivors of Wilms tumors, a rare type of childhood kidney cancer, had more than three times the risk of high blood pressure during pregnancy when their treatment included abdominal or pelvic radiation.
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