THE CHILD PROJECTS FOLLOWING A CANCER DIAGNOSIS

Abstract

About 6% of cancers occur in individuals between the ages of 17 and 44, for whom starting a family belong to their concern having an impact on their quality of life. The diagnosis of cancer changes radically the lives of patients and constitutes an additional difficulty to accomplish this kind of project.Using data from “VICAN2”, we estimate a multinomial logit model in order to identify the main determinants of the evolution of the desire to have a child, by comparing parental plans before and after the diagnosis of ‘cancer.Socio-demographic factors and those related to the patient’s medical care have a significant impact on the evolution of parental projects. For women and patients with a low level of education, parental projects tend to disappear. On the other hand, age, being already a parent and the current number of children, lead parental projects to be maintained or to appear over the period. In addition, parental projects are maintained or appear more frequently when the healthcare team devotes more time to answering patients’ questions, or when the patient is in contact with an association of patients.Thus, characteristics of the patient medical care have a strong influence on this individual decision-making, making it important to favor in order to promote parental projects after the diagnosis of cancer.