A young woman has given birth using ovarian tissue removed and frozen when she was 13, it was announced today.
Doctors decided to preserve the girl’s fertility when she had to undergo a bone marrow transplant for sickle cell disease.
Details of the woman were being kept secret today – but doctors revealed she moved to Belgium from the Republic of Congo at the age of 11.
Her child was reported to be healthy.
Details of the successful birth, reported to be the first of its kind, were reported in the journal Human Reproduction.
The procedure involved ceasing hormone replacement therapy that the woman received up to the age of 23.
Doctors defrosted the ovarian tissue and grafted four fragments onto the remnants of her left ovary. Some 11 other fragments were also grafted.
The woman took four years to become pregnant, partly because her partner at the time of the procedure was infertile.
By the time she was 27 she had a new partner and became pregnant. The baby was born in November weighing 6.9 lbs.
Dr Isabelle Demeestere, a gynaecologist and research associate in the Fertility Clinic and Research Laboratory on Human Reproduction at Erasme Hospital, Université Libre de Bruxelles, said it looked as if the woman would be able to have further babies – as the ovarian tissue was still working.
She said it was still not known if the procedure would work on girls who had not reached puberty.
She said: “This is an important breakthrough in the field because children are the patients who are most likely to benefit from the procedure in the future.
"When they are diagnosed with diseases that require treatment that can destroy ovarian function, freezing ovarian tissue is the only available option for preserving their fertility."
Isabelle Demeestere et al. Live birth after autograft of ovarian tissue cryopreserved during childhood. Human Reproduction 10 June 2015; doi:10.1093/humrep/dev128
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