Woman delivers healthy baby from ovarian tissue frozen in childhood
11 Jun 2015
A 28-year old has become the first woman to give birth to a healthy baby using ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen in her childhood.
In earlier successful transplants, researchers had used frozen ovary tissue removed from adult women, but this was the first instance of ovarian tissue taken from a girl when she was just 13 years and 11 months old.
It remains unknown though, whether tissue taken from girls before puberty could develop to produce mature eggs.
The breakthrough, would give hope to thousands of young cancer victims who undergo chemotherapy, which could damage the ovaries, leaving them infertile.
The breakthough procedure is described in the journal Human Reproduction.
The patient was born in the Republic of Congo but moved to Belgium at the age of 11, and had received a transplant of her brother's bone marrow to treat her sickle-cell anaemia.
According to The Times, the procedure required chemotherapy to disable the immune system and prevent rejection of the bone marrow.
The girl had her right ovary removed just before she turned 14 and tissue fragments were frozen. Though puberty and breast development had begun, she had not started her menstruation.
She was left without a functioning ovary and when 15, doctors started her on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to induce menstruation.
A decade later, doctors grafted four parts of the frozen ovarian tissue onto her remaining ovary and the transplanted tissue later started growing eggs.
She became pregnant after more than two years, and last November, gave birth to a nearly seven-pound baby boy.
According to Dr Isabelle Demeestree, a gynaecologist and fertility researcher at Erasmus Hospital in Brussels, it was a very happy moment and she was most happy for her patient because she was afraid if this did not work, there would be no other option for her to have a baby, AP reported.
Dr Demeestree said the doctors did not know what would happen when one transplanted tissue (back) into a patient that was completely immature, but once she saw that she had started ovulating and her hormone profile was normal, she was quite sure the patient would get pregnant.