According a US fertility expert, young women should freeze parts of their ovaries if they want to postpone motherhood until later in life. This advice came from Dr Sherman Silber at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting in Denver.
According to Dr Silber who is based at the St Luke's clinic in Saint Louis, this procedure would work better than egg freezing and since women are most fertile when they are young this works. He did the first full ovary transplant in 2007.
Dr. Sliber explained that although egg-freezing techniques are currently available at clinics in the UK, they usually harbor only a handful of eggs at a time. This may not guarantee successful pregnancy later in life. Whereas storing a part of an ovary may yield as many as 60,000 eggs.
Dr. Siber said, “The question is, how many cycles of egg retrieval do you need to feel comfortable and secure that you have enough eggs? There's no absolute answer. Women who do egg freezing can't just have one cycle and think they've got it all solved.” But for those who choose for several rounds of egg retrieval have to pay for every single procedure, making it “prohibitively expensive” he said. But he said that removing and then freezing around a section of the ovarian tissue meant “one procedure and the whole thing is done”.
There are already seven centers around the world that offer the storage of frozen ovarian tissue, there are none in the UK. And many experts are skeptical of the procedure. Tony Rutherford, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said the research was still very recent and more research is needed. He said, “We don't know how many people have grafts and therefore we don't know how many have been successful and how many have failed… We need to see clear evidence of [the method's] effectiveness and that's what we don't have at the moment.” A spokesman for the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority said, “This is a relatively new procedure and is still being developed.” Susan Seenan, of Infertility Network UK also warned, “I would have to urge caution. The best time to have children is when a woman is younger.”
Dr Silber however has claimed his hospital in Saint Louis has so far managed to carry out three successful ovarian tissue transplants using frozen tissue, which resulted in three births. Worldwide there have been 23 births from ovary or ovarian tissue transplants.
Dr. Silber also said, “We are in the middle of a fertility epidemic across the developed world and the reason our society is changing…People are not trying to have children or are not even thinking about getting married until they are 35.”
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