PRESERVE YOUR FERTILITY: FREEZING YOUR OVULES, YOUR BEST OPTION

There are three main reasons to consider freezing your ovules:

1. To win more time. Most women who freeze their eggs are not ready to get pregnant. These women want to improve their chances of having children when they are ready later in life. Women postpone motherhood for multiple reasons. For example: they are waiting to have more financial security, they want to finish their studies or they are still looking for the right partner. Let’s say you’re in your 30s, but you’re not ready to have children yet. If you freeze your eggs now, you can preserve them while it is still viable to do so. Then you can unfreeze them and use them when you’re ready to get pregnant in your 30s, 40s, and even 50s.
2. To protect your fertility during a medical treatment. Chemotherapy and radiation treatment for cancer can leave you infertile. If you remove and save some of your eggs before treatment, you may have the option to fertilize and transfer the eggs to your uterus after you recover.
3. To avoid discarding embryos during in vitro fertilization (IVF). Additional IVF embryos are usually frozen and transferred later or discarded. Freezing your ovules allows you to fertilize only the eggs needed for IVF and freeze unfertilized eggs for later use.

The younger you are when you congelate your eggs, the better. As you age, your ovaries age too. The result? Your fertility decreases and the risk of having a baby with chromosomal abnormalities increases. There are other factors, but the age of the ovules is the main reason.

Your eggs are frozen immediately and can be stored indefinitely. The more egg cells you have, the more chances you have of an egg surviving the process of freezing, thawing, fertilizing and transferring to your uterus. When you are ready to get pregnant, your eggs will be thawed. As with IVF, ovules that survive thawing are combined with sperm in a laboratory to create embryos. Usually between one and four embryos are placed in the uterus at the same time. You may prefer to do the collection process a few times to make sure you have enough stored eggs. Experts recommend that a 33-year-old woman store between 20 and 25 frozen eggs to have a good chance of getting pregnant later. Older women should freeze more, because they have fewer healthy eggs to collect. 

When women want to use the vitrified oocytes, they will be fertilized by perfoming an IVF or a microinjection with the semen of the couple or a donor. It generates embryos that will be transferred to the patient who will have had a previous endometrial preparation to favor embryo implatation. Children born after undergoing in vitro treatment with frozen ovules do not present differences with children born from assited reproduction treatments in wich the vitrification of ovules has not been resorted, therefore the freezing of the oocytes does not suppose any problem for the future of the baby.

Do you want to know more about fertility preservation? In Medtravelco we’ll love to clarify all your doubts so that you know how your fertility preservation process will be.