Breastfeeding during R-CHOP chemotherapy. Please abstain!

Treatment of cancer during pregnancy has been extensively studied, but few data are available about the management of women with cancer diagnosed during breastfeeding. Breastfeeding offers many advantages to mothers and their children, but anticancer drugs may pass into human milk and damage infants, whose detoxifying systems are still in development. Thus, knowledge about the excretion of anticancer drugs in breast milk is relevant, because in the absence of data most women stop breastfeeding while receiving (chemo)therapy. Here, we report the concentrations of antineoplastic drugs in the milk of a woman who maintained lactation with breast pumping during R-CHOP (rituximab, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisolone) therapy.