Egg Freezing Preserves
Your Fertility Chances
There are numerous
reasons why some women
struggle with fertility.
As many as 12 percent of women in the
U.S. have difficulty conceiving or carrying
their baby full-term without some form of
modern reproductive assistance. The good
news for these women, as well as those who
encounter fertility challenges as the result of
age or a cancer diagnosis, is that innovative
medical technology is tackling the problem
head on. Oocyte cryopreservation, or egg
freezing, can serve as a fertility insurance
policy for many women who suspect that
fertility will become an issue for them in the
future.
Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
While cryobiology, the process of preservation by chilling or freezing, seems
like a relatively modern idea, it has actually existed for about 4500 years. Early
human civilizations noticed that the decay of organic materials slowed down
in the presence of colder temperatures. Thus, as far back as 2500 BC, astute
healers would use cold for medical purposes. However, the ability to freeze and
thaw cellular tissues was not perfected until the mid-1950s when the first frozen
sperm was used to create a live, healthy human baby.
Once that medical feat was accomplished, medical scientists got to work even
more enthusiastically, finding the right combination of factors to successfully
freeze and preserve the female egg so it could be used to increase the success
rates of assisted reproductive technology once it was thawed again.
Their perseverance has paid off. The first baby conceived using a frozen egg
was born in 1986. Now, egg freezing is becoming an increasingly popular
means of fertility preservation for multiple populations of women. These include:
Women diagnosed with a cancer that affects fertility or
requires treatment that may cause infertility.
Career-focused women who understand the connection
between age and fertility and want to preserve viable eggs
for future assisted reproductive technology (ART).
Women who want to use ART but aren’t interested in using
frozen embryos.
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
Women in their 30s who haven’t found a life mate yet
but know they want to experience pregnancy, birth and
motherhood.
Women who have a family history of early menopause,
primary ovarian insufficiency or other medical conditions
linked to infertility.
Are You a Candidate for Egg Freezing?
Considering the scenarios listed above, let’s go into a little more detail about the
types of women who are most commonly interested in freezing their eggs.
Facing a cancer diagnosis.
Women facing a cancer diagnosis, especially
cancers that affect the reproductive organs and/or that require treatments
associated with infertility, are excellent candidates for egg freezing. This
population is one of the driving forces behind the research that has been done
in regards to fertility preservation. Once a woman’s cancer treatments are
completed, eggs can be thawed and fertilized, and the resulting fetuses can be
implanted (typically one at a time) via in-vitro fertilization. In some cases, married
couples also appreciate the idea of banking frozen eggs because, in worst-case
scenarios – if the cancer diagnosis becomes terminal - the husband’s sperm
can be used to fertilize the egg and a gestational carrier can be used to carry
and deliver a healthy baby that carries on the maternal line.
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
If either case applies to you, you will work closely with your oncology team as
well as a trusted egg bank to retrieve the eggs and store them as quickly as
possible so your cancer treatment can commence without delay.
On the career track. There is no mistaking that maternal age plays a large
part in fertility success. By the time a woman reaches age 40, her chances of
becoming pregnant via unassisted reproduction decrease dramatically. Thus,
younger women who do not foresee becoming mothers prior to age 35 years or
older are increasingly drawn to egg freezing as a way of protecting their chances
of becoming biological mothers to their future children. Please Note: this should
NOT be a reason to delay conception longer than you would have otherwise
since freezing eggs does not guarantee you will be able to get pregnant.
Not interested in frozen embryos. There is no doubt that cryopreservation
of eggs brings along a host of concerns and, potentially, ethical dilemmas. Some
of our clients find that while they are comfortable with the idea of egg freezing,
they feel less comfortable with the idea of frozen embryos. Their eggs can be
retrieved and frozen in their younger years. Then, when they are ready, the eggs
can be unfrozen and fertilized one at a time, or in small batches, to produce fresh
embryos, mitigating the need for using frozen embryos for IVF cycles.
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
Haven’t found your life mate…yet! If having a life partner and family are
a priority for you, it can get pretty stressful as the years tick by and you’re still
waiting for the love of your life to enter the picture. Odds are, he or she will
appear, but freezing your eggs can help to preserve your fertility chances if
parenthood isn’t a possibility until your biological clock has stopped ticking.
Down the road, your partner’s sperm will be used to fertilize the egg and the
resulting embryos can be used for IVF.
Women with a history of early menopause or medical conditions
associated with infertility. Many conditions linked to female infertility,
like early menopause, primary ovarian insufficiency and polycystic ovarian
syndrome (PCOS), are genetic. If your mother, grandmother, aunts or sisters
have experienced them, there’s a good chance you are at riskas well. Freezing
your eggs earlier on – in your 20s or early 30s – can increase your chances of
conceiving via IVF if you aren’t able to conceive on your own.
We can’t emphasize the connection between age and fertility enough. If any of
the above issues are a concern for you, contact Columbia Fertility Associates or
a reputable egg bank to learn more and discuss your options. If you do decide
to freeze your eggs, time is certainly of the essence and younger eggs mean
increased chances of IVF success down the road.
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What are the success rates for using
frozen eggs for in-vitro fertilization?
Currently, the success rates for using frozen eggs are just as good as using fresh
eggs. If you enjoy reading medical studies, you can read this one and that one,
both of which show that frozen and fresh eggs yield nearly identical implantation
and live birth rates when the frozen and fresh eggs are age matched. The
operative words there are AGE MATCHED.
Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
Since age is linked to egg viability, and younger eggs are typically more viable
than older eggs, the success of the frozen eggs in future IVF cycles will depend
largely on the age of the women when the eggs are harvested. If eggs are frozen
when a woman is in her 40s, then the success rate of those eggs will be lower
than fresh eggs from a woman in her 30s.
How are eggs frozen, anyway?
This is a good question, and the answer would vary depending on when you
asked it. Eggs are more challenging than sperm to freeze and then thaw as a
result of their high water content. When water freezes, ice crystals are formed. In
the case of human egg water, these crystals often damage the genetic material
located in the egg, making it nearly impossible to yield viable eggs able to be
fertilized and create genetically healthy babies without a very precise process.
Thus, scientists experimented with freezing methods (slow-freeze and fast-freeze
techniques) and different cryoprotectants (chemicals that act like anti-freeze) to
prevent the eggs from forming as many of the detrimentalice crystals and to yield
ever-higher success rates.
Although cryopreservation techniques still vary from clinic to clinic, most methods
use processes similar to the following:
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
1.
Ovarian stimulation. First, the woman will be given fertility
hormone injections that stimulate the ovaries, causing them to mature
multiple eggs at a time. This takes about two weeks, at the end of
which a medication is administered, causing the body to release all the
eggs at the same time.
2.
Egg retrieval. Once the eggs have matured and have been released,
the woman will visit the clinic to have the eggs retrieved via the vagina
using an ultra-sound guided needle. Depending on your body and
how it reacts to the egg retrieval process, this can take anywhere
between two and five weeks.
3.
Egg freezing. The eggs go through a vitrification process in which
they are placed in a bath, or solution, containing cryoprotectants and
sugars. The sugars help to draw a little of the water out of the egg and
the cryoprotectants protect it from developing crystal formations. Then
nitrogen is used to flash-freeze them, which further prevents crystals
from having time to form.
4.
Egg thawing. Eggs are thawed rapidly to minimize the breakdown of
vital genetic material and they are quickly removed from the vitrification
solution.
5.
Fertilization. Once they have been thawed, the eggs are fertilized
by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), whereby a partner’s or a
donor’s sperm is directly injected through the egg’s outer membrane,
which becomes slightly hardened by the cryopreservation process.
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
The resulting embryos can be implanted via IVF procedures right away (with
fresh embryos), or the embryos can be frozen and stored until the mother is
ready.
What are the benefits of egg freezing?
Egg freezing has exponentially expanded the chances of biologic fertility for
certain females at risk for infertility. Prior to the advent of successful egg freezing
techniques, women with reproductive cancers, medical conditions that rendered
them infertile, and those who wanted to become mothers beyond their most
fertile windows had two options: adopt children or use donor eggs for IVF. While
both of these are viable options, and are often recommended depending on a
couple’s particular infertility diagnosis, neither results in a child that is biologically
related to the mother. Oocyte cryopreservation has changed that for good.
Now, modern women have the option to freeze eggs in the hopes that they can
conceive a biological child of their own when they are ready to become mothers.
Another advantage of egg freezing is that you have the benefit of time and
scheduling on your side when it comes to the other end of the ART process:
your in vitro fertilization cycle. As we mentioned above, you must go through a
relatively intense two to five week period of fertility hormone injections leading
up to the egg retrieval process. This in itself can be physically and emotionally
uncomfortable.
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
By undergoing the egg freezing process ahead of time, you can enjoy a few
months – or a few years – “off” before you commence your IVF cycle. This gives
couples more flexibility to save money, travel, relax, work a little longer, enjoy life
with a cancer-free diagnosis and so on before pregnancy, labor and parenthood
take over their lives.
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Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
How do I find the best clinic
to freeze my eggs?
Unlike IVF rates, which are published by the CDC each year (always two years
behind), there is no way to verify the success rates of any one clinic’s frozen
eggs. This data simply isn’t tracked yet. Thus, we recommend taking a different
approach. If you are freezing your eggs, you are going to require at least one
round of IVF in order to yield a live baby from the stored eggs. Your best bet,
then, is to begin researching fertility clinics and work your way backwards from
there.
If you find a fertility clinic you like, ask if they offer egg freezing technology inhouse. If not, chances are high that the clinic will have connections with egg
banks or other clinics that can do the egg freezing for you. Odds are that if a
fertility clinic has high IVF success rates, they only associate with the very best
egg banks in the nation. Columbia Fertility Associates partners with several egg
banks in the D.C. area and across the nation. We’ll be happy to assist you in
finding a reputable resource that is convenient for you and your schedule.
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Contact Columbia
Fertility Associates
to Learn More
About Egg Freezing
and Fertility
Preservation
Do you fit the profile of a woman
who might benefit from egg
freezing? Would you like to
learn more about the fertility
preservation process?
Please contact Columbia Fertility
Associates today. We can speak
with you on the phone, schedule
a face-to-face consultation or
send you detailed materials
regarding egg freezing and your
modern reproductive options.
CFA looks forward to keeping
your dreams of fertility and
parenthood alive and well for as
long as it takes.
Egg Freezing Preserves Your Fertility Chances
Washington, DC
Bethesda, MD
Arlington, VA
2440 M Street NW
10215 Fernwood Road
1635 N. George Mason Dr.
Suite 401
Suite 301A
Suite 155
Washington, D.C. 20037
Bethesda, MD 20817
Arlington, VA 22205
Phone (202) 293-6567
Phone (301) 897-8850
Phone (703) 525-4776
Fax (202) 778-6190
Fax (301) 897-8040
Fax (703) 525-8013
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