Received April 28, 1998
Accepted May 17, 1998

Introduction:This study assessed fertilization and pregnancy outcome achieved with cryopreserved spermatozoa from cancer patients using ART and compared these results with infertile patients that were submitted to assisted reproductive procedures. Materials and Methods:We studied 649 cycles of ART in 454 infertile patients with no malignancies and compared these results with 18 cycles of ART performed in 10 cancer patients who transferred their cryopreserved semen specimens from our sperm bank to 7 outside IVF programs in. These patients had the following diagnoses: Hodgkin's disease (n=5), testicular cancer (n=2), leukemia (n=1), or prostate cancer (n=2). The length of specimen storage ranged from 14 to 145 months. Results:The median prefreeze motility was 44%, and the median total sperm count was 31.1X106. At 24 hours after banking, the median postthaw motility was 11% and the median total sperm count was 6.6X106. A total of 18 cycles of ART were performed among ten couples with an overall pregnancy rate of 50% per couple, with two deliveries, one ongoing pregnancy, and two miscarriages. The pregnancy rate per cycle of IVF and ICSI was 36.4%. These results are similar to those obtained in non-cancer infertile patients, were we found a pregnancy rate of 32.8% per couple, a pregnancy rate per cycle of ART of 23%, pregnancy rate per embryo transfer of 25.6% and an implantation rate of 13.5%. ConcIusions:These results indicate that poor quality cryopreserved spermatozoa from cancer patients, irrespective of the length of storage, may provide successful results with the latest micromanipulative techniques such as ICSI.