Techniques for Preserving Fertility Offer Hope and Choice for Women Needing to Postpone Pregnancy and Motherhood

Some women make the decision to postpone motherhood for a variety of reasons including social, financial, work or health issues. For these women, there are now several techniques available for preserving female fertility which can offer women the possibility of postponing motherhood, for those who choose to do so, or for those who have cancer.

According to IVI, a company based in Europe, these fertility preservation techniques may be a promising option for women who are at risk of losing their ovarian function: such as women who have been diagnosed with cancer and are going to be treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy, women who have been diagnosed with autoimmune diseases requiring chemotherapy or bone marrow transplants, and women at risk of needing repeated ovarian surgery to treat such disorders as endometriosis.

From the IVI web site, we have developed a summary of some of the more recent options and treatments available to women for maintaining their fertility. These include:

Vitrification of ovocytes: The vitrification of oocytes allows the mature eggs obtained following ovarian stimulation to be cryopreserved so that they can be used at a later date, when the patient decides she is ready, with the same prognosis as at the point when they were vitrified.

Freezing of the ovarian tissue: Cryopreservation of the ovarian cortex is a technique would enable ovarian function to be restored, meaning that spontaneous pregnancies could even be achieved, and in addition, due to having normal levels of hormones, the secondary effects of an early menopause (osteoporosis, hot flushes, and cardiovascular problems) would be avoided.

Transposition of the ovaries: Transposition of the ovaries is a technique used for preserving fertility that consists of removing the ovaries from the field of radiotherapy in order to avoid their direct exposure, and thus prevent the considerable tissue damage.

In vitro maturation of oocytes (IVM) : this consists of recovering immature oocytes from follicles which have not been stimulated or which have only been minimally stimulated, and their cultivation in a suitable medium until they reach maturity. This would be to avoid ovarian stimulation which may be useful in patients for whom it is in their best interest to avoid ovarian stimulation, such as patients with hormone-dependent tumors.

These treatments targeting the preservation of fertility for cancer patients cannot guarantee that pregnancy will be achieved in the future, but they do provide hope that, for these women, it will at least be possibly to try.