Freezing your Eggs for a future Pregnancy
Nowadays more women are waiting until later in life to have a baby. If you also wish to have a child, but not in a condition to become a mother at the moment, freezing your eggs may help you to conceive in the future – when you are ready to start a family.
Normally, a woman is most fertile in her 20s when her ovaries contain many healthy eggs. As the years pass, the quality and quantity of her eggs declines. A woman in her early thirties may have 10-15 eggs available for freezing after the hormonal stimulation for each cycle, but for women in their late thirties and early forties, the number is usually much lower. Besides, as women age, they are more likely to have eggs with genetic abnormalities. These facts should be known by every women especially approaching to their 40s.
Thankfully, egg freezing can allow you to preserve some of your eggs for future use. In recent years, it has been accepted as a non-experimental procedure due to advances in freezing techniques. In Turkey, a woman can freeze her eggs legally for use at a later time for social reasons such as delaying motherhood for her career.
The process to freeze your eggs involves several steps
Freezing eggs or embryos?
Freezing fertilized eggs (embryo cryopreservation and storage) is still the best option to preserve a woman’s fertility due to medical or social reasons. Embryos frozen to use in future in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures have high chance of implanting and creating a successful pregnancy. However, if you do not have a partner, you may want to consider egg freezing. Besides, if you will undergo some medical treatments such as radiation, chemotherapy or removal of the ovaries for cancer or a variety of other medical conditions, you may wish to freeze your eggs for medical reasons.
Egg freezing (with medical words; oocyte cryopreservation) without fertilization is increasingly successful. The chance of a live birth from frozen “cryopreserved eggs” is now similar to the chance from ‘fresh’ eggs which are used in IVF treatment. The two most important factors that determine the chance of having a baby from frozen eggs are your age when your eggs are frozen and the number of eggs that are stored.
How many eggs should I freeze? Is there a number that will guarantee my pregnancy in the future?
Actually, there is no clear answer to this question. But it will probably vary significantly depending on how old the woman is when she freezes her eggs.
The number of eggs available for freezing and their quality is important because in every step there is a risk that some are lost. Some of the eggs retrieved may not be suitable or mature for freezing, some may not survive the freezing and thawing processes, and some may not fertilise or develop into good-looking embryos. Of the embryos that are transferred, only some will result in a pregnancy, and besides, some pregnancies may miscarry. Briefly, if a woman wishes to freeze her eggs, the sooner, the better.
With all these advancements in scientific techniques, at Medicana IVF Centre, we are able to offer egg freezing to enable more patients to live all their reproductive options.
What is the procedure for egg freezing?
The process to freeze your eggs involves several steps.
Before you move forward with this type of fertility preservation in Medicana, you will meet with one of our doctors. He/she will review your medical history, perform an gynaecological exam and order necessary bloodwork. The aim is to make sure you don’t have any fertility issues that could interfere with egg freezing.
Once one of our doctors determines that you’re a good candidate for egg preservation, you may start the process to freeze your eggs.
To obtain eggs for freezing, a woman will usually undergo hormonal stimulation over 10–12 days. There are a variety of stimulation techniques, and your doctor will decide which protocol is the most appropriate for your treatment. The medications are usually self-administered by pen injection using a tiny needle under the skin easily. Patients are given education how to do this at the beginning of the stimulation.
After the stimulation and follow up period, the eggs are removed from the ovaries in a minor procedure performed under sedation (patients are asleep for the procedure) which takes about 15 to 20 minutes. It is called oocyte pick-up, OPU.
This procedure is performed by the fertility specialist using an ultrasound guided probe. Attached to the ultrasound probe, there is a needle guide. The fine needle passes through the vaginal wall into the ovary and collect the eggs from the ovary.
Patients can go home in a few hours on the same day.
Then our laboratory team will evaluate and freeze your mature eggs for future use.
Egg freezing uses a highly effective rapid freezing technique called vitrification. It transforms the liquid in each egg into a glasslike substance in seconds by decreasing the temperature to – 196° Celsius. So, it prevents from the formation of ice crystals that might damage the egg.
When you’re ready to conceive using your frozen eggs in future, the laboratory will thaw your eggs and fertilize them with sperm from your partner. Your doctor will then transfer one of the resulting embryos to your uterus, just like a frozen IVF/ICSI cycle.
Please remember that according to the current legislations in Turkey, sperm donation is not possible and you should come with your partner for IVF. However, you may also decide about transferring your frozen eggs to another Centre where you wish to have you IVF treatment cycle. Then you will just pay for the period your eggs have been stored.
With all these advancements in scientific techniques mentioned above, at Medicana IVF Centre, we are able to offer egg freezing to enable more patients to live all their reproductive options.
Please complete our inquiry form to have more information about egg freezing in Medicana.
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