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| Treatments - Oocyte (Egg) Cryopreservation |
Oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) is the process by which a woman’s unfertilized eggs are extracted from her ovaries and frozen at a very low temperature using rapid or flash freezing techniques (vitrification). Vitrification allows for excellent egg survival after thawing. When a woman is ready to attempt pregnancy, our team will thaw her eggs and fertilize them to complete the in vitro fertilization process.
Women choose egg freezing for different reasons. A woman diagnosed with cancer, who has not yet begun chemotherapy, now has the option of preserving her fertility by cryopreserving her eggs for future use. For many years, this option has been available and successful for men diagnosed with cancer, by freezing their sperm prior to chemotherapy.
A growing trend is women who choose to postpone childbearing for their careers or other personal reasons. Many women are simply unaware of the impact of age on the number and quality of eggs they will produce. Fertility peaks in most women in their 20’s. Around age 35, fertility starts to decline at a more rapid pace. In fact, at age 40, your chance of getting pregnant in any given month is less than 5%. If a woman is over 35 years of age and has been trying to conceive for 6 months without achieving a pregnancy, she should seek the care of a fertility specialist. As women become more aware of their biological clocks and the impact on their ability to have a child using their own eggs, egg freezing is being more widely considered. We are the first clinic in Canada to offer egg freezing for social and personal reasons. Although controversial, many other clinics have started to follow suit.
Egg freezing involves a woman taking daily hormone injections for approximately 10-12 days. During this time, blood work and ultrasounds are performed to monitor the client’s response to the hormones. Once the follicles (the sacs that the egg grows in) are of mature size, a hormone injection is given and two days later the eggs will be retrieved by the physician under conscious sedation. The same day the eggs are collected, they will be frozen.
When ready for a pregnancy, the woman’s uterine lining will be prepared with oral estrogen, and once adequate, the frozen eggs will be thawed and fertilized with her partner’s sperm or donor sperm. The now fertilized eggs will be watched for 3-5 days for embryo development and then transferred to the uterus. Approximately 11 days following the embryo transfer, a blood pregnancy test will be drawn to determine if a pregnancy has been established. |
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