Keep Calm and Freeze your Eggs!

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

The quality of a woman’s egg, her ovarian reserve, diminishes with age, while the reproductive organs maintain their ability to carry a pregnancy. The decrease in quality is relatively gradual until the age of 35, after which the rate increases. When egg quality decreases, the chance of pregnancy decreases and the risk of miscarriage and genetic abnormality increases. A woman is born with all of the eggs she will ever have, and over time, they diminish in number and cellular integrity. This decline explains why a woman in her 40s has only a 5 percent chance for becoming pregnant each month, and her eggs have an increased chance for aneuploidy after age 45.Egg freezing offers you flexibility in delaying pregnancy for later in life and allows you to take control of your own biological clock.

Things to know about Egg Freezing:

• Health issues such as endometriosis, premature ovarian failure, family history of early menopause, and cancer can be a reason for women to freeze their eggs
• If health related issues are not the reason then the most important reason for freezing eggs is to plan for a baby in future which delays due to their education, career, relationships, dream etc.
• The average age of women freezing their eggs is 36 as the quality and the quantity depends on the age
• Fakih IVF would recommend that 10 eggs be stored for each pregnancy attempt, and most women of up to 38 years of age can expect to harvest 10 to 20 eggs per cycle
• Eggs are frozen in liquid nitrogen, where they can remain frozen indefinitely
• Hormone medication is used in order to achieve the desired number of eggs. It takes approximately two to three weeks to complete the egg freezing cycle, which is consistent with the initial stages of the IVF process, including 10 to 14 days of hormone injections to stimulate the ovaries and ripen multiple eggs
• As the best and most precise indicator of a woman’s remaining ovarian reserve, the Ovarian Assessment Report measures a woman’s reproductive hormone levels to decide whether she can extend her fertility through egg freezing.
• Long term storage of frozen eggs does not result in any decrease in quality

Egg freezing gives us the ability to expand woman’s nurturing window another decade or more. It offers us the opportunity to sequence our work and personal lives if we so choose.