What is Female Fertility Preservation?
Infertility is defined as the impairment of the ability to have children.
Women may choose this option over embryo cryopreservation, if they have no current male partner or for personal/religious reasons.
As women get older, they may encounter difficulty getting pregnant (conceiving) with a healthy baby.
Women are born with 1-2 million eggs.
Biologically, it is easier to get pregnant before age 30. However, due to professional, social, or health reasons, a woman might not be ready to get pregnant at that time and she might want to defer having a child until the time is right for her. Understanding the normal age effect on future fertility, these women may seek out treatments to remove and freeze eggs to be saved for potential use in the future.
How does it work?
The treatment process is similar to the first stage of IVF (in vitro fertilization), which is a high complexity treatment for ART (assisted reproductive technology) that is used to treat some patients with infertility.
The treatment consists on 12 days of medication (daily hormone injections) to stimulate the ovaries to mature and develop eggs. The whole process is monitored by transvaginal ultrasounds and blood work hormone levels check up.
The eggs are retrieved under general sedation (no longer than 15-25 minutes) outpatient procedure.
Once removed are derived to the embryologist at the IVF lab to evaluate, clean and cryopreserve them.
The eggs can be frozen indefinitely.
Does preservation of my eggs guarantee a baby later in life?
Actually no. Unless the woman freezes her eggs at her early 20s or early 30s, the probability of yielding quality eggs after her 30s lowers enormously.
Freezing your eggs is not a guarantee of a future baby. A baby should be conceived whenever she feels ready to do so.
Freezing your eggs might give you a false security and try to conceive at an advanced age.
Fertility preservation for patients with cancer:
ART allows your attending doctor to remove and freeze eggs before your cancer treatment. This way, you may be able to have a baby after your treatment.
The most common cancers in young women are Hodgkin or non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, or gynecologic cancers (cervix, uterus, or ovary). Most of these cancers can be treated with chemotherapy, radiation, or a combination of both. Several factors determine if you are infertile after treatment. Chemotherapy is effective in treating many cancers, but it can cause infertility by harming/decreasing the number of eggs.
You must have in mind that not everyone is a candidate for egg freezing.