Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
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Stem Cell Transplant-Myeloma- Freeze Sperm
Sperm cryopreservation via semen collection by masturbation remains a standard of care for fertility preservation among men with cancer (MM) or other diseases requiring gonadotoxic treatment.
Most everything when wrong with my multiple myeloma (MM) treatment since my diagnosis in early 1994. Diagnosis, treatments, short, long-term, late stage side effects, you name it, it went wrong for me. But my cryopreservation or cryostorage, went well.
Because the study linked below documents the cryopreservation of sperm, I thought I would add my personal experience to the documentation. Guys, if you are going to store your sperm, read the info below.
- Men seeking cryostorage ranged in age from 12.8 to 67.
- Cryostorage requests increased by a factor of 10 over 40 years.
- The single greatest increase came from men about to undergo a stem cell transplant (SCT)
- Requests were wide spread among cancer and non-cancer patients.
- Sperm cryopreservation via semen collection by masturbation remains a standard of care for fertility preservation among men with cancer or other diseases requiring gonadotoxic treatment…
- Semen volume, sperm concentration and total sperm output were all significantly higher on the first compared with the median of all semen samples for that individual… I think this means that guys must “collect” sperm repeatedly. You don’t want to run out of sperm.
All chemotherapy is “gonadotoxic.” If you are about to undergo chemotherapy for any reason, and you might want kids someday, cryopreserve your sperm.
The study doesn’t talk about this but it was important to me so I’ll tell you. The nurse handed me a plastic cup, lubricant and showed me to a room with a bed and told me that there were magazines in the drawer. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided to ask the nurse if I could create the sample at home (my wife and I lived close by) and immediatly deliver the sample to her each morning.
The nurse okayed this idea with the condition that I keep the bottle warm each morning while enroute. Long story short, my wife and I produced 6 samples, over six mornings.
My wife Dawn underwent artificial insemination about two years later and our son Alex was born on 9/25/98.
Last tip. Store lots of sperm. Dawn was inseminated during the first try but it could have taken multiple trys.
Are you about to undergo chemotherapy or radiation? If you have any questions, scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I’ll reply to you ASAP.
To Learn More about Cancer and Fertility- click now
Good luck,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Recommended Reading:
- What Caused My Multiple Myeloma?
- Multiple Myeloma, Result of the WTC, Side Effects, Options?
- Secondary Cancer-Side Effect of Myeloma Therapy Lurks…
Gonadotoxicity
“Gonadotoxicity is the damage to gonads, namely the testes and ovaries, by substances that are either produced in the body (eg: antibodies) or introduced into the body (eg: cancer drugs) or by environmental factors such as extreme temperatures or radiation…”
Sperm Cryopreservation Prior to Gonadotoxic Treatment
“Experience of a Single Academic Centre Over 4 Decades
This study analysed data from 2717 men comprising 2085 men with cancer, 234 men with non-cancer medical disease and 398 controls who were healthy volunteers for sperm donation (Table I). Men seeking cryostorage (median 29 years, range 12.8–67 years) were similar in age to controls (median 30, range 18–58 years) with 136 (6.5%) under 18 years of age…
Over 40 years requests for cryostorage increased progressively more than 10-fold with a consistent distribution between haematological, testicular and other cancers…
For all banked samples, the overall median time in cryostorage was 8.5 years..
Haematological malignancies accounted for nearly a third of the patients (Hodgkin’s 12%, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 10%, leukaemia 10%), followed by testicular cancers accounting for nearly a quarter (seminoma 14%, teratoma 10%) with other malignancies (17%) including sarcoma, gastrointestinal, glioma, head and neck, prostate, melanoma, lung and others…
Semen volume, sperm concentration and total sperm output were all significantly higher on the first compared with the median of all semen samples for that individual…
Yet there has been an increase in requests from men about to undergo bone marrow transplantation, a procedure that increased dramatically world-wide from <10 000 to over a million annually in less than the last 3 decades (Gratwohl et al., 2015…
Sperm cryopreservation via semen collection by masturbation remains a standard of care for fertility preservation among men with cancer or other diseases requiring gonadotoxic treatment…
We conclude that sperm cryopreservation is a well-established and feasible clinical procedure aiming to preserve male fertility prior to gonadotoxic treatment for cancer or other diseases. As a practical, low cost approach to insure fertility, sperm cryostorage is a readily integrated, best practice component of comprehensive cancer or other medical treatment regimens to overcome iatrogenic damage to spermatogenesis and male fertility for all post-pubertal males. Long recognized in oncology and the law that advising young male cancer patients on sperm cryostorage prior to cancer treatment is an essential component of adequate medical care (Oktay et al., 2018)…