| Greetings,
In a recent newsletter, I touched on the use of oocyte
cryopreservation (egg freezing) as a still-experimental
fertility treatment option that's in the news a lot.
While egg freezing techniques are still being eyed with
scrutiny as to their success rates, the idea of
preserving future fertility, especially for cancer
patients, is neither new nor thought of as outlandish.
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What is Fertility Preservation?
The term "fertility preservation" refers to various
technologies that can be used by people with normal
levels of fertility to put off conceiving until a later date.
The most common use of fertility preservation is to
assist young men or women who are about to
undergo treatment for cancer.
Complete sterility -- that is, having no reproductively
useful eggs or sperm -- is often a side effect of many
cancer treatments, whether administered by radiation
or chemotherapy.
So when a young person who may want to have
children later in life is learning about their treatment
options for surviving cancer, they should also be
informed about their choices for preserving their future
fertility by way of cryopreservation.
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Freezing the Future
Because sperm cells are generally more durable than
egg cells, the practice of cryopreserving or freezing
them has been around long enough to be practically
perfected. Many babies have resulted from frozen
sperm.
Oocytes, or egg cells, are very fragile, so scientists are
still working to find solutions to the problems
commonly associated with the freezing and thawing
procedures. Still, a few hundred "frozen-egg babies"
so far have been born around the world.
Samples of ovary tissue have also been successfully
frozen, thawed, and re-implanted in women, with a few
babies thus far being the outcome.
Some researchers see benefits to one over the other --
frozen eggs or frozen ovarian tissue. An example of
the differences in these attempts to preserve fertility
lies in the need for super-ovulating medication. In
order to make egg freezing a viable option for an
individual woman, she must take fertility drugs to
ovulate more than one egg. The goal is for her ovaries
to be induced to make 10 or more eggs in one cycle.
In addition to the usual risks of super-ovulation,
women with certain cancers can actually suffer related
setbacks. Some fertility medications carry the potential
to increase certain cancer's activity. In those cases,
freezing the ovarian tissue may provide the safer
option.
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Surviving & Thriving
Reproductive specialists have always felt a strong and
humble calling to their profession by the privilege of
helping to create life. Advanced reproductive
technology is made even more special by enabling us
to help men and women who defeat life-threatening
cancer to go on and build families. You can get more
information on support resources and education for
cancer-related fertility preservation at http://fertilehope.org.
Fertility preservation is well on its way to becoming a
standard approach to planning life. We welcome your
questions, whether about your own situation or that of
someone you love.
Sincerely,
Sonja B. Kristiansen, MD
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