EGG FREEZING
Many women can benefit from egg preservation. Especially those women who are delaying becoming mothers. During this process, a woman’s mature eggs are grown and then extracted utilizing traditional IVF treatment methods. This technique typically involves three steps of treatment:
Stimulation: The woman takes hormones to help her ovaries make more eggs in one cycle.
Collection: The eggs are then collected via a small procedure which is usually done under sedation.
Freezing: The collected eggs are frozen & kept in a special place until the woman is ready to use them.
This treatment is perfect for those undergoing medical treatments, like chemotherapy, which might affect fertility.
Who would benefit from egg freezing?
Women from five major categories want this reproductive service:
- Women who want to wait to start a family know that as they age, their fertility decreases. In order to save their eggs for later use, they are opting to get IVF therapy sooner.
- Women with cancer as chemotherapy and radiation treatment causes negative impacts on women’s fertility as many of them become menopausal.
- Those are women with a family history of premature ovarian failure, those who are likely to have premature ovarian failure, women with genetic disease that affects ability to conceive or have children (Turner syndrome).
- Those patients or gynecological couples that, due to their religious or ethical beliefs, do not like the idea of freezing embryos that may remain after IVF treatments and would prefer the idea of preserving unfertilised eggs.
- Couples whose sperm cannot be obtained on the day of egg collection.
How would my eggs be retrieved?
Using conventional IVF methods, a woman’s mature eggs are developed and then further extracted during egg freezing. The three stages of treatment that are often involved in this are pituitary suppression, ovarian stimulation, and egg retrieval.
Your doctor will give you a detailed explanation of each of these known treatments. A needle guided by ultrasonography is placed into the vagina to freeze or remove the eggs. Additionally, it enters every ovarian follicle. The fluid is then extracted into a test tube, leaving the flask with an equivalent volume of fluid. Eggs are gathered for freezing in order to analyze the material from each follicle’s head. Depending on the cyst’s location, it should only take 30 minutes at most, and the procedure is carried out while the patient is sedated or anesthetized. As a result, you will need to spend around an hour in the recovery room after the procedure.
Throughout your cycle, you will also need to be monitored using transvaginal ultrasonography and serial blood sampling. Following the surgery, there may be some vaginal spotting or actual bleeding, along with some moderate cramping and pain. If the pain worsens or the blood loss becomes more severe, please contact the clinic. Warmth in the form of a heat pack, hot water bottle, or painkiller should assist. You’ll need to take roughly two days off from work.
There are risks and side effects associated with egg retrieval methods as well as any possible treatments. We advise you to speak with your treating specialist about each of them.
How many eggs can I anticipate receiving from an IVF cycle?
The quantity of eggs recovered during a single stimulation cycle varies greatly from person to person. Your age, health, and how well you react to the medication treatment all play a significant role. Furthermore, when it comes to the quantity and quality of eggs produced from human oocytes, “more is not necessarily better.”
Your fertility specialist will adjust your medication and treatment regimen based on your individual needs and/or past results while keeping these considerations in mind.
How does cryopreservation work?
Numerous elements affect our ability to freeze any cell and make it survive. Sperm cells must be dehydrated before freezing to avoid rupture because water swells in volume when it transforms to ice. The risk of cell rupture can be significantly decreased by adding a cryoprotectant, which does not expand when frozen.
However, techniques for the cryopreservation of oocytes and embryos employ a method known as “vitrification.” The mixture of cryoprotectant and egg/embryo produces a glass-like structure under this method because cooling rates are so fast (greater than 20,000C per minute) that ice cannot form. The preferred technique for preserving eggs or embryos is vitrification, which is what we regularly do at AdBaby IVF Center.
What are the limitations?
The oocyte (egg) is the largest human cell. contains a high percentage of water. Additionally, it is intolerant and sensitive to the physical and chemical stressors brought on by freezing and thawing. An oocyte should ideally be prepared for fertilization by a single sperm when it is ovulated, or removed from the ovary, during an IVF cycle. Meiosis is the process by which the egg gets ready to lose half of its DNA in preparation for fertilization. An oocyte with too much or too little DNA might result from meiosis being disrupted by any changes in the physical or chemical environment surrounding the oocyte. Therefore, these additional barriers to the effective freezing and thawing of oocytes persist even after we have surmounted the challenges of sensitivity and cell water content.
Although the main goal of freezing is to increase the egg’s chances of survival when it thaws, some damage or side effects of the process may not kill the cell but instead make it “less viable.” The fact that eggs do not fertilize well after thawing is a significant problem. This is because the membrane is partially disrupted, preventing the sperm from conventionally fusing and penetrating the egg surface. Therefore, in order to obtain satisfactory fertilization results with thawed eggs, artificial techniques of aided insemination must be used. Known as Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), this process is widely used in fertility clinics across the globe. By injecting a single sperm directly into an egg, it circumvents the majority of common obstacles to fertilization.
Egg freezing storage
Patient Consent: We are aware that the embryos would typically be stored for ten years in a frozen state. We would notify you (the ART Clinic) at least six months in advance if we wanted to prolong this time frame. You may either (a) use them for study purposes or (b) dispose of them if we don’t get back to you before then. We also know that cycles which use frozen embryos have a lower pregnancy rate than cycles that use fresh embryos, and that some of the embryos might not survive the thaw that follows.
Conditions and Terms
1.Information Provision: I thus commit to contacting the aforementioned clinic at least once a year to submit up-to-date information about my address, phone number, and intentions about my cryopreserved gametes, as long as I keep them in storage at the clinic mentioned above. It will be considered abandonment and indicate my wish to stop storing cryopreserved gametes if I don’t: (i) get in touch with the clinic for a full year; (ii) reply to a request for information from the clinic within ninety days of receiving it; or (iii) give a new address or forwarding address where mail is returned to the clinic as undelivered.
2. Fee Payment: I am aware that the expenses associated with storing and cryopreserving my cryopreserved gametes fall under my purview. Fees for cryopreservation and storage are due. At the moment of gamete cryopreservation and at the start of each subsequent yearly storage cycle, these are due. I am aware that there is no reimbursement for these costs and that there will be no prorated adjustment for periods of incomplete storage. As stated in the clinic’s clinical records, if the annual fee for storing my cryopreserved gametes is not paid within a year of the first invoice being sent to my address, the clinic may determine that I no longer want to keep these specimens. In that case, I will give the clinic instructions to discard my cryopreserved gametes.
3. Failing to Pay Fees or Provide Information: I so agree to the following disposal of the cryopreserved gametes by the clinic in the event that I am unable to attend or pay the cryopreservation expenses as specified in sections 1 and 2 above:
(i) to take (yes/no) from storage for later disposal If No to (i) above, proceed to (ii) to (iv) beneath 4. Another Point of Contact/Accountable Individual I therefore designate a substitute contact and my agent to take over the responsibilities of sections 1 and 2 above in the event that I am unable to do so because of illness. A signed affirmation from me that they have read this form and will be in charge of its terms in the event that I am unable to is attached.