Who Should Consider Egg Freezing?
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Women who have a serious medical condition such as cancer can preserve their future fertility with egg freezing before they undergo procedures such as chemotherapy, radiation or surgery that may damage their ovaries or decrease their fertility.
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Women who are undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures may choose to freeze their eggs, rather than embryos, to use in the future. Egg freezing is also an option when sperm is not available for fertilization on the day of egg retrieval.
IVF Overview
Egg freezing, or oocyte cryopreservation, is a relatively new procedure in the field of assisted reproductive technologies. Overall, this technology increases a woman's potential to have children later in life. Since the first successful pregnancy using egg freezing was reported in 1986, hundreds of babies have been born. Currently, pregnancy rates are between 30 and 40 percent.
Egg freezing and the vitrification process are considered the “gold” standard in fertility treatment. Vitrification, which is a rapid-freezing process, solved the problems that occurred during previous methods of egg freezing, like slow freezing, and has led to high success rates of both implantation and live births.
Studies show that fertilization and pregnancy rates for frozen oocytes (or eggs) are similar to results obtained using fresh oocytes during the IVF/ICSI process. Researchers also found that using frozen eggs does not lead to an increase in birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities or developmental deficiencies.
A highly specialized program, the Fertility Preservation Program of IVF Saint Germain offers hope for safeguarding fertility, for future family building, to patients diagnosed with cancer. Our experienced and compassionate treatment team can help patients access, understand and afford the available options.
Egg Freezing Process
-Hormonal treatment in the form of injections is given for approximately 8 to 10 days, stimulating your ovaries to produce multiple mature follicles/eggs.
Eggs are retrieved from your ovaries through an ultrasound-guided follicle aspiration. You will receive sedation for this procedure.
Your eggs are then placed in a “vitrification solution” called cryoprotectant, which helps protect your eggs during the freezing and thawing process. Each egg is carefully placed into liquid nitrogen and stored frozen at a temperature of -196˚ Celsius.
Your eggs will remain frozen in a liquid nitrogen storage tank, in our embryology laboratory, until you are ready to conceive.
Objective Statistics And Expectations For Egg Freezing
These simple statistics are based on a single treatment cycle yielding enough eggs to provide a reasonable chance of success. If you respond well to stimulation treatment so that we collect 10 eggs, we would expect that 8 of these, on average, will be mature and suitable for freezing.
We would anticipate that all of them would survive the freezing and thawing processes successfully. Upon thawing, the eggs are subjected to ICSI and fertilisation would be confirmed the next day. We can estimate that there would be approximately 6 viable embryos. On average, depending upon the age of the egg at freezing, each of those viable embryos has a 15-30% chance of leading to a live birth. Therefore, the original group of 10 eggs should lead to a 60-80% chance (cumulative) of a live birth.
Of course there will be wide individual variation around each of these figures, but they do indicate the potential success of the treatment. Younger women could expect to produce more than 10 eggs, each of which would have a higher expectation of implantation than those of older women. Hence, the younger the woman at the stage of egg vitrification, the better the results that can be expected. The age of the woman at the stage of thawing and implantation has a negligible impact upon outcome.