The legacy of DES

The miracle of modern medicine is not always such a miracle. A recent article in one of my journals got me to thinking about the risks involved in taking all of these drugs as a way to get pregnant. The article was on the legacy of DES. DES stands for diethylstilbutrol (or something like that), and it was a drug used from the 1920's to the 1950s. DES is a relative of estrogen, and it initially had many commercial uses, both in foods and livestock, as well as eventually in medicine. They gave it to women who were pregnant to reduce the morning sickness, and eventually as a preventative against miscarriage. There really wasn't any evidence to support its use in this way, but it didn't seem to cause any real harm and so it continued to be prescribed for quite some time.
Those women prescribed DES for the most part had uneventful pregnancies and births. It wasn't until their children hit puberty that things started happening. The babies exposed to DES in utero (specifically the female babies) experienced some sort of permanent change to their reproductive organs. At the ripe old age of 15-19 these young women were contracting a rare type of vaginal cancer called Clear Cell Adenocarcinoma. I don't know the details on how deadly it was or how difficult to cure, but cancer for a young girl is never good, especially in that area. And then those young women had all of the side effects of their cancer treatment, which could certainly put their own reproductive future at risk. Turns out the males had some long-lasting problems too, but it wasn't cancer and it took someone looking for problems to figure it out.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it was not easy to track the root of this cancer problem back to a drug given to these girls' mothers 15-20 years ago. But this was the beginning of a huge push to ensure that all drugs given to pregnant women are safe for the mother AND the fetus. Mostly that testing is done in animals.

So what about the drugs I'm taking now. I trust my doctors, and IVF has been around for ~10 years now. But the drugs that I am specifically taking are probably relatively new to the market. And no one has been able to say that children with exposure to these things are going to be normal in their teens. We just haven't gotten there yet. But this is the path I've chosen. Might as well go through with it full force and hope for the best.