Abstract
BackgroundMalignancy during pregnancy has become a significant cause of maternal death in developed countries, likely due to both an older pregnant population, and increases of cervical cancer in younger women. Our aim is to investigate the clinical aspects of malignancy during pregnancy in Japan and to use this information to identify opportunities for earlier detection and treatment.MethodsWe provided a questionnaire to 1508 secondary or tertiary care hospitals in Japan. We reviewed the clinical characteristics of cases with malignancy during pregnancy for the period of January to December, 2008. From the 760 institutions which responded, we obtained clinical information for 227 unique cases. The questionnaire provided clinical information, including disease site, pregnancy outcome and how the disease was detected.ResultsThe most common type of malignancy was cervical cancer (n = 162, 71.4%) followed by ovarian (n = 16, 7.0%) and breast cancer (n = 15, 6.6%). Leukemia (n = 7, 3.1%), colon cancer (n = 5, 2.2%), gastric cancer (n = 5, 2.2%), malignant lymphoma (n = 4, 1.8%), thyroid cancer (n = 3, 1.3%), brain cancer (n = 3, 1.3%), endometrial cancer (n = 2, 0.9%), and head and neck cancer (n = 2, 0.9%) accounted for the remaining cases. Overall, gynecological malignancies accounted for 79.3% (95% confidence interval 74.0–84.6) of pregnancy associated malignancies diagnosed in the present study. The majority of cervical cancers, 149 (92.0%) of 162, were diagnosed by a Pap (Papanicolaou) smear during early gestation. Ten (62.5%) of the ovarian cancer cases were diagnosed by ultrasonography during a prenatal checkup or at the time of initial pregnancy diagnosis. Out of 14 breast cancers, only one (7.1%) was diagnosed by screening breast exam.ConclusionsFrom this study, we reaffirm the clear and significant benefits of prenatal checkups starting at an early gestational age for the detection of gynecological cancers during pregnancy. Conversely, breast cancer detection during pregnancy was poor, suggesting new strategies for early identification of this disease are required.
Highlights
Malignancy during pregnancy has become a significant cause of maternal death in developed countries, likely due to both an older pregnant population, and increases of cervical cancer in younger women
We have investigated the clinical characteristics of malignancy during pregnancy in Japan, with the goal that our findings will contribute to the earlier detection and better management of malignant diseases during pregnancy
We developed a questionnaire to investigate the clinical characteristics of all cases of pregnancy associated malignancy and distributed copies of this questionnaire to all training hospitals within the Japanese Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology (1475 institutions) and the Japanese Association of Clinical Cancer Centers (32 institutions)
Summary
Malignancy during pregnancy has become a significant cause of maternal death in developed countries, likely due to both an older pregnant population, and increases of cervical cancer in younger women. The increase is attributed to higher rates of cancer in general and to delays in childbearing to the third and fourth decades of life for women [5]. This is associated with increase in the incidence rate of cervical cancer in 20 to 49-year-olds has been seen in Japan [6,7,8]. Several reports on malignancies during pregnancy have been published [3, 9,10,11,12,13] (e.g. Cancer Statistics of American Cancer Society’s Epidemiology Research Program, a population-based cohort study from the Cancer Registry and the Medical Birth Registry of Norway, and an international collaborative setting of institutional registry in Belgium, the Netherlands and Czech Republic)
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