Fertility Preservation

A woman’s fertility is at its highest in her twenties, but for many women having a baby at this stage of life is not an option, and many are now planning to start families in their late 30s. It can get harder to conceive as a woman gets older; her chances of miscarriage also increase. This is because the number and quality of the eggs in the ovaries declines rapidly after about 35 years of age.

The effects of these changes are best illustrated by national ART databases in the United States and the United Kingdom and they show that the success of IVF also declines with increasing age for example at under 35 years the live births per cycle started was over 30%, at 38 years it is around 20% and over 45 years that figure drops below 5%.

We know that the success of IVF in an older woman using eggs donated from a younger woman generally depends on the age of the donor. A ‘young’ egg is more fertile, and the resulting embryos have a better chance of implanting successfully.

Vitrification for fertility preservation

Egg freezing

Egg freezing allows a woman to store eggs to preserve fertility. Here at Lifesure fertility and gynecology center, women go through the IVF stimulation and egg collection processes, but instead of being mixed with

sperm the unfertilised eggs are frozen. When you’re ready to use your eggs, they are thawed and fertilised before being implanted into your uterus. The process generally takes a couple of weeks.

The technology is relatively new but the results are encouraging, such that units around the world are achieving 25% pregnancy rates using frozen vitriage. The number of babies born following these procedures is increasing all the time.

Declining fertility is due to the age of the eggs, and therefore fertility preservation is most effective if a woman is young when

her eggs are frozen. However, it can also be suitable for women in their mid-30s or older who do not want to have a family just yet.

Embryo freezing

If you have a partner you may choose to freeze embryos for future fertility treatment. Embryo freezing involves undergoing an IVF cycle where your ovaries are stimulated with hormone injections, prior to the eggs being retrieved in a short surgical procedure, then fertilised with sperm in a laboratory and the resulting embryos frozen and stored. Frozen embryos can be stored for many years. Find out more about IVF treatment…

When considering embryo freezing it is important to note that where embryos are created, both partners have the right to veto future use of the embryos. The serious consequences of this, should your relationship break down, for either the woman or man undergoing fertility preservation, would be that you could lose access to your own reproductive material.

Expectations from vitrification

These simple statistics are based on a single treatment cycle yielding enough eggs to provide a reasonable chance of success. If you respond well to stimulation treatment so that we collect 10 eggs, we would expect that 8 of these, on average, will be mature and suitable for freezing.

We would anticipate that 80% would survive the freeze and thaw process. Upon thawing, the eggs are subjected to ICSI and fertilisation would be confirmed the next day. We can estimate that there would be approximately 4 viable embryos. On average, depending upon the age of the egg at freezing, each of those viable embryos has a 15-30% chance of leading to a live birth.

The wide individual variation around each of these figures, but they do indicate the potential success of the treatment. Younger women could expect to produce more than 10 eggs, each of which would have a higher expectation of implantation than those of older women. Hence, the younger the woman at the stage of egg vitrification, the better the results that can be expected.

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