Fertility Drugs More than Double Childhood Cancer Risk, Researchers Say

Children born to women who took fertility drugs are more than twice as likely to develop leukemia, French scientists announced Tuesday. Researchers from the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health (INSERM), based in a southern suburb of Paris, linked the use of ovarian-stimulating drugs to a 2.6-fold increase in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common type. The risk of developing the rarer acute myeloid leukemia was increased 2.3-fold by the drugs, according to research presented at the Childhood Cancer 2012 conference in London. Children whose mothers struggled to conceive for more than a year were 50 percent more likely to develop ALL, the study found.

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