Hear from Dr. Mindy Christianson on updates around two methods for preserving female fertility—ovarian tissue cryopreservation and oocyte cryopreservation. Both techniques have proven to be promising options for women who at risk of infertility due to gonadotoxic therapies with ovarian tissue cryopreservation being the only available technique for preserving fertility in prepubertal girls.
Hello this is dr mindy Christianson from the johns Hopkins fertility center. And I'm excited today to give you a brief update on fertility preservation. So one area that we're seeing a lot of growth is oocyte cryopreservation or egg freezing. It was in 2012 that egg freezing was announced to be no longer experimental. And what that's done is it's really improved access to care for women receiving fertility preservation. We see a lot of patients that are center for fertility preservation prior to Canada toxic treatments such as cancer treatment. But we're also today seeing a lot of women who are doing most crowd preservation to electively delay childbearing or electively delay parenthood. This maybe for career educational choices. Um and it's really a wonderful opportunity for women if you have patients to ask about egg freezing. It's important to have them have a consultation sooner rather than later, ideally the best time to freeze your eggs. It's before the age of 35 because with age the egg quantity goes down. But so does the egg quality. Um so it's really important to counsel women about that. And what we do when we see a patient for consultation for egg freezing is will check and AM H. Level just to see what their egg quantity is that can help us in counseling patients. So if you have a patient is interesting interested in egg freezing early referral is key. Another area of growth that we're seeing a lot of it's ovarian tissue freezing or ovarian tissue Cryopreservation. This fertility preservation modality was considered experimental until December of 2019 when it was announced by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. That freezing ovarian tissue is no longer considered experimental. Um freezing ovarian tissue is a newer technology. And then the literature, there's been about 130 reported libraries from freezing ovarian tissue. So not as much as freezing eggs. And the reason being is that freezing ovarian tissue is the only fertility, but the only fertility preservation modality available for pre puberty, girls or girls who haven't started having their periods yet in that age group, it's not possible to harvest eggs for freezing. So a lot of the patients that we've frozen ovarian tissue for are still quite young. But I'm a very in tissue freezing is really growing and it's becoming more popular. Um There's still only a a small number of centers on the East coast that opera variant tissue freezing. If you have a patient who's interested, we are also happy to see them for a consultation. So please reach out to me if you have any questions at all about freezing eggs or freezing ovarian tissue. Thank you
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