For the first time, a woman who had an ovary removed as a child and part of it re-implanted as an adult has given birth. Her right ovary was removed at the age of 13, before she had started menstruating, because she was about to receive immunosuppressive therapy that would damage her fertility. Ten years later, it was thawed and part of it implanted, enabling her to become pregnant naturally.
This is good news for the many other girls and women who have their ovaries stored in freezers, but how does the treatment work, and what are the risks?
We don’t know how effective ovarian transplants are. Thousands of women are thought to have had their tissue stored, but we don’t know how many have had their tissue thawed and re-implanted. We do know that there have been at least 30 successful pregnancies worldwide, using transplants of ovarian tissue that had been taken from adult women.
It was unclear whether parts of an ovary taken from a child would work in the same way. This case shows that it can, and that the transplanted tissue has a promising lifespan.
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The result is relevant for other women who had their ovaries frozen as children. Surgeons began to remove and store ovarian tissue in this way in the mid-1990s, and many of the children who had their tissue frozen then are now reaching child-bearing age, so we are likely to see many more cases like this soon.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: All you need to know about conceiving babie from thawed ovaries
