Insights on Fertility and Survivorship in Hairy Cell Leukemia

According to Dr. Alessandro Gozzetti, fertility and reproductive health are overlooked but crucial aspects of survivorship for patients with hairy cell leukemia. At the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation 2025 Conference, he highlighted the importance of addressing these issues, drawing on both clinical experience and the limited literature on hairy cell leukemia in pregnancy and fertility outcomes.

His session emphasized the need for systematic data collection to better understand how hairy cell leukemia treatment affects fertility and to support patients in returning to a normal life.

Gozzetti is an associate professor in the Department of Medical, Surgical, and Neuroscience Sciences at the University of Siena, specializing in medical sciences with a focus on blood diseases.

Transcript

Your session at the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation 2025 Conference focuses on hairy cell leukemia and fertility, an area that is often under-discussed but critical to patient survivorship. What inspired you to bring attention to this topic, and what key insights do you hope clinicians and patients take away from your presentation?

It happened that I faced a young woman who had received a hairy cell leukemia diagnosis. She was 32 years old, and she was pregnant in the first trimester. As a clinician, I always [want] to treat the patient as best as I can, and when you see a pregnant woman, this motivates one even more to be careful with the woman and the child. Therefore, I was interested in seeing what was reported in the literature about hairy cell leukemia and pregnancy, and only 15 cases were reported. I thought this was an important occasion to report how we faced and successfully treated our patient in this field.

There is also another point of interest, which is that for the many patients that we treated in the past, many younger women and men, we don't even know what their fertility outcome is or if they had children. Therefore, this is a thing that must be explored and must be collected.

We have the occasion to have this wonderful Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation 2025 Conference. We have this wonderful registry, which is being made. So, this is really an occasion to collect data about patients treated in pregnancy to enlarge the data, and also collect data about fertility, which is a very, very important thing for the patient to have a normal life and go back to a normal life.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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