Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Women have options when illness could threaten their capacity to become pregnant at a later date.

June 10, 2015
By Laura Donnelly

In a world first, (click here) a woman has given birth after surgeons implanted ovarian tissue that had been removed when she was a child.
The girl was coming up for her fourteenth birthday when she was diagnosed with acute anaemia, needing powerful, ovary-damaging treatment.Before the therapy, her right ovary was removed and frozen in fragments in the hope that it could be used if she ever wanted to become a mother.
A decade later, surgeons in Belgium thawed some of the fragments and reimplanted them. A healthy son was born last November.Several babies have been born from tissue taken from adult women, but this is the first success with tissue removed before puberty, doctors reported in the journal Human Reproduction.
"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," said Isabelle Demeestere at Erasmus Hospital at Brussels Free University, whose team carried out the transplant....