What is Egg Freezing?
Egg freezing is a method used to save women's ability to get pregnant in the future. Eggs harvested from your ovaries are frozen unfertilized and stored for later use.
Why it's done?
As a woman ages, egg quantity decreases and their quality declines, with higher risk of miscarriage，infertility and have babies with chromosomal abnormalities.
Freezing eggs when you are younger preserves your best quality eggs for future, to give yourself the best possible chance for a healthy baby.
Who should Freeze the Oocytes?
- Women who are not ready to become pregnant at this time especially when over 35 years old
- Patients receiving chemotherapy or radiation that affect the number and quality of oocytes
- People with genetic problems Types that cause ovarian deterioration, such as Turner syndrome, Fragile X syndrome
- Those who need ovarian surgery such as ovarian cyst, ovarian tumor Chocolate Cyst
- Those who freeze eggs for donation which is acceptable in some countries
- In the case of in vitro fertilization treatment, the husband cannot ejaculate. There are no sperm in the semen or the number of sperm is insufficient to fertilization.
What is Egg Vitrification and How Egg Vitrification Works?
In the past, it was difficult to freeze eggs due to the cell's tendency to develop ice crystals during the freezing process, which compromise the integrity of the egg, as well as harden the egg's outer membrane, making later fertilization difficult.
The preferred method is a flash freezing process called vitrification. Vitrification is a technique for rapid freezing of eggs. With it, they are preserved in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196º C, thus maintaining their characteristics at the time they were cryopreserved.
How you prepare?
- The doctor will schedule the appointment to do an evaluation of your ovaries to assess their readiness to undergo stimulation through blood tests and ultrasounds.
- The person supplying the eggs receives medication injections for 8-10 days, depending on the individual response.
- Throughout this phase, You will be asked to come into the clinic 2-3 times, for blood tests and ultrasounds. Using these results the doctor may modify your treatment plan and medications. Once the eggs have reached the desired sizes, the doctor will make an appointment to remove them from the ovaries.
Getting Started:
Egg Freezing
The earlier the better! Advanced maternity age is defined as 35 years or older, so the best time to freeze your eggs is in your 20's to early 30's, so that if you plan to have a baby after 35, you will have a higher chance of success with younger, better-quality eggs.
There have been thousands of babies born from frozen eggs. Promising data support that there is no increased risk for birth defects, and it does not increase the chance of chromosomal abnormalities or more disability.
Using advanced egg freezing methods available at SAFE, you can freeze the eggs indefinitely without weakening them. Some babies have been born from frozen eggs stored longer than 14 years. It is generally recommended to freeze eggs before the age of 50, as pregnancy complications beyond this age may occur.
When the woman is ready to use the frozen eggs to achieve pregnancy, these cryopreserved eggs are placed in warming solution and assessed. Those eggs that survived the freezing process are fertilized with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), and the fertilized eggs will grow in culture until the embryo(s) are ready to be transferred into the uterus to achieve pregnancy.
A common misconception about egg freezing is that it will cause early onset menopause, as more than one egg is usually retrieved at a time. However, the stimulation cycle for egg freezing encourages immature egg cells to mature so that more eggs can be harvested. This explains why egg freezing does not cause early-onset menopause.
As with many medical procedures, the health risks of egg freezing include infection, loss of blood, and organ damage. However, these are highly unlikely.
