Ovarian transplant boost
Tuesday June 30th, 2009
New techniques are set to improve the effectiveness of ovarian transplant procedures, researchers reported yesterday.
At a European conference, one research team reported on the effectiveness of freezing ovaries.
Frozen ovaries allow women to preserve them prior to treatment for cancer.
A second research team told how they had developed a technique to improve the success of the operation itself - and how this had led to one pregnancy.
The details were reported at the conference of the European Society of Huamn Reproduction and Embryology in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
A team from St Louis, Missouri, USA, said that ultra-fast freezing had proved as effective using fresh tissue in ovarian transplants. The high-speed method is known as vitrification and prevents the formation of ice.
Researcher Dr Sherman Silber said: "We found that 91.9 per cent of the fresh oocytes were viable compared with 88.9 per cent of those vitrified. However, slow freezing resulted in a 56 per cent loss of viability."
The findings came from a study of 15 young women undergoing cancer treatment.
Meanwhile French experts from the Limoges University Hospital described a two-step technique for ovarian transplants. This had led to a woman with sickle cell anaemia having a baby.
Researcher Dr Pascal Piver said: "After transplanting her own ovarian tissue she started ovulating in four months and became pregnant naturally six months after transplantation. Both mother and baby are doing well."
The procedure involves grafting small pieces of ovarian tissue three days before the main transplant - with a few to encouraging the growth of blood vessels.
* British researchers told the conference of a new test to identify healthy human eggs a few hours after fertilisation.
The aim of the test is to give women the best chance of pregnancy after laboratory procedures have been used to fertilise eggs.
The procedure, known as Comparative Genomic Hybridisation or CGH, has been tried at Oxford University, UK, and allows scientists to study all the chromosomes of the fertilised egg.
Researcher Dr Elpida Fragouli said: "Out of 35 patients who had embryo transfers after the test, we achieved a pregnancy rate of 20 per cent, which is exceptional considering the extremely poor prognosis of the women involved.
"This represents a doubling of the usual pregnancy rate for women who fall into this category, which is otherwise, at best, under 10 per cent and, at worst, zero.
"To date, we have two live births from this group, and all the other women who became pregnant have maintained their pregnancies."
Tags: Childbirth and Pregnancy | Europe | North America | Women’s Health & Gynaecology
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