Fertility preservation: what are women’s options?
Extending your ability to possess children is increasingly becoming a true option, whether you select this feature thanks to cancer treatment, a special medical reason or because you would like to delay having children until later in life.
Women consider fertility preservation for several medical and private reasons, consistent with the National Institute of kid Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
If you’re suffering from cancer, the treatment you undergo can damage your ovaries, leaving you unable to possess babies within the future. an equivalent might be true if you’ve got been exposed to toxic chemicals in your workplace or during military service.
Preserving your reproductive tissues may allow you to delay motherhood in these cases.
But benign conditions also can affect your fertility. Non-cancerous tumors, endometriosis or uterine fibroids can put you in danger of premature ovarian failure, which suggests that your ovaries stop producing ovules or oocytes, at an earlier age than normal.
This can also happen albeit there’s no clear link with such benign conditions. Your menopause may begin before your 40th birthday, and genetic causes are believed to be the most cause.\
How to preserve fertility?
There are several alternative ways to preserve fertility: frozen embryos, frozen ovules, and frozen ovarian tissue. The first fertility preservation method made use of previously frozen embryos, which are implanted at a later date during a manner almost like In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). But a drawback of this system is that a male partner or sperm donor is required to fertilize the woman’s eggs to supply the embryos before they freeze. In some cases, especially in young women and girls, this is often not an option.
Then came the freezing of the oocytes. Here, the eggs freeze then at a later date. Once they’re fertilized, the embryo is often implanted.
The first baby conceived with this method was born in 1986. However, the devil is within the details; The cells generally don’t wish to be frozen and are very vulnerable to damage of the ice crystals formed as a result of the freezing method.
A newer method for preserving oocytes is vitrification, which may be an in no time freezing “in the absence of ice.”
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