Fertility reserve?
December 8, 2010
Fertility reserve?
For several years, cells have been frozen before cancer treatments in order to allow those affected to produce offspring after prolonged therapy. This is most commonly done with sperm cells. Later, fertilized eggs and embryos were also included. However, freezing of eggs was only possible in a fertilised state, since they are relatively insensitive. If a woman wanted to preserve eggs before cancer treatment, this was possible if she was in a stable relationship with a man, so that they could be cultured from IVF eggs and then fertilized with the partner’s sperm – and finally frozen for preservation. Women without a partner were at a disadvantage, as unfertilised eggs were poorly resistant to freezing.
At least since the introduction of vitrification, a freezing process that does not or only slightly damage the affected cells, this has fundamentally changed. As is well known, the chance of a pregnancy decreases with increasing age of the woman. In German cities, every second mother is now over 35 years old at the time of the birth of their first child.
This is due, among other things, to the declining quality of the eggs. Frozen eggs from a 32-year-old woman lead, even after being frozen for years, to a higher probability of pregnancy than fresh eggs from a 42-year-old woman. Why shouldn’t a woman start at the age of 30 and have some of her eggs extracted in order to build up a „fertility reserve“?
Now there is discussion in various professional and lay circles about whether women should not be frozen in order to prevent procedures from being performed even when there is no medical need. After all, the woman in question must undergo (multiple) hormone therapy to grow several eggs. Even the harvesting is not completely harmless, since the eggs must be obtained via vaginal follicular puncture.
From Gynecologist 51-2010:
„In the Netherlands, two professional associations (the Society for Gynecology and Obstetrics and the Society for Clinical Embryology) have advocated that women be allowed to freeze their eggs, even without a medical reason (such as before cancer treatment), in order to be able to get pregnant at a time of their choosing later on.
However, an upper age limit of 45 years was recommended for the fertilization and implantation of the cells.“