Assisted reproduction has always been one of the most dynamic medical fields. The continuous advancements over the last few years have made it possible to overcome the challenges that we are facing due to lifestyle changes: advanced maternal age, increased level of stress, sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy consumption habits (obesity, consumption of alcohol and drugs, etc.).
At present, the desire to become a mother or a father is coming later. We wish first to complete our education by longer years of study, have economic stability and make it easier to reconcile work and family life… These are just some of the issues we are raising before deciding to become parents and reasons for delayed paternity.
Fertility preservation is a treatment consisting of preserving your gametes (eggs or spermatozoids) by maintaining their biological capacity and allowing you to postpone maternity/paternity until the day you decide when you wish to form a family.
More and more women seek to freeze their eggs and so preserve their fertility. The optimal time for this procedure is before the age of 35. It can be performed later too, but the specialists emphasise that from this age, the egg quality worsens and can negatively affect future pregnancy chances.
The beginning of this process is similar to the stimulation for in vitro fertilisation, that is to say, you have to undergo controlled ovarian stimulation to increase the number of mature eggs obtained in a cycle. About 10-12 days later, the fertility specialist extracts the follicles from your ovaries to collect the eggs that are later vitrified. The ageing of the egg and deterioration related to passing time stop through this process. The oocytes can remain frozen indefinitely, and their quality is retained.
The pregnancy rate and probability of having children with cryopreserved eggs are directly related to the number of eggs obtained and vitrified, as well as to the age of the woman when she underwent the stimulation. Freezing your eggs at an earlier age, reproductive-wise, allows for a higher probability of a pregnancy in the future, although we must be aware that any kind of fertility treatment does not guarantee it at 100%.
If you are interested in this technique or wish to get more information about a particular treatment, email us at ivf@centromedicomanzanera.com or fill in the contact form, which you will find on our webpage: https://centromedicomanzanera.com/en/formulario-en/
María Pombar Gómez
Embryologist
IMAGE: https://www.crianzafeliz.com.ar/2017/01/06/embarazo-una-oportunidad-informarse/