Yes, you can freeze your eggs. Fortunately, we are in the era where we have had a recent
development of a vitrification. We have been freezing eggs from a long time, however from
the last decade, the new process of egg freezing by a fast freezing process of vitrification
has enabled us to give lots of women a very reassuring option of freezing eggs. You might
want to consider freezing eggs if you are suffering from illness like cancer, whereby
you need to undergo chemotherapy which can affect your fertility in future or even women
suffering with severe endometriosis where you have to undergo surgery to get a relief
from it, egg freezing is a good option. Other category of a women who go for egg freezing
largely called as elective egg freezing or social egg freezing is, if you are wanting
to delay your fertility because to have an option in your career or you're not with the
right partner at the moment. You don't need to rush into a relationship. You can actually
freeze eggs to give yourself that a sigh of relief and not have that pressure off on you.
Other category I would say is women having transition to male to have an option of biological
children in future. Egg freezing is a good option for yourselves as well and also women
who are in risky, life-threatening jobs like in Armed Forces or deployed to go to the borders.
Egg freezing would be a good option for you as well.
The egg freezing process involves, of course, a first step would be to see a physician to
make an appointment to see your consultant. You will undergo-- first will be assessment
of your ovarian reserve, your medical history or ovarian reserve. Ovarian reserve assessment
includes a transvaginal scan to look at your ovaries and count the number of follicles
which will give the current status of your ovary and to do a blood test of anti-mullerian
hormone which also then tells us what is your current fertility status. Following that once
we've got the fertility status, protocol is made that is just a perfect one for you for
yourselves. You will see the nurse who will carry out some blood tests for you including
infectious screening of HIV, hepatitis and so on. Once all that is done and it's clear,
infectious screening is not to check your ability to freeze eggs, it's just to know
that if you need to store your eggs in a different-- away from the others because of the risk factors.
Once that's done, you start your medication which is [indistinct] which is roughly around
ten days to two weeks’ time. You will be injecting yourself. We monitor you by doing
transvaginal scans and checking your oestrogen level in your blood. Once we feel, once we
see the follicles are ready, then we do the egg retrieval which is done by using a transvaginal
ultrasound guided aspiration; which is done under sedation. It's usually a 15-20 minutes process.
Yes, everyone can freeze their eggs. It is slightly tricky to say when you should freeze
your eggs. It does depend on your ovarian status and what is your current ovarian reserve
and of course, the outcome or final outcome of egg freezing is dependent on your age.
So, the number of eggs and the age at which you froze the eggs are the two important parameters
to know the outcome of the whole process of egg freezing. Everyone can. Once we have some
eggs to freeze, once you've had your ovarian status assessed. We always say the younger
biologically, younger you are, the better the outcome will be for your frozen eggs.
So I would really recommend that if you are-- normally women when they are in their early
thirties should start contemplating or thinking about if you want to do it and that would
be the right time to take a take action if required or start thinking about egg freezing
to get the best possible outcome.
Yes, you can freeze your eggs after 40. It is quite a tricky question because it's very
difficult to-- it's very difficult to assess biologically how well someone will do with
the process of egg freezing because there's so much variability, person-to-person variation
and how your ovaries age or how your eggs will age because that's such an uncertain
factor in egg freezing. We don't come to know till we have thawed those eggs and we created
embryos to see what the embryo quality is. We can freeze eggs after 40, but we have to
understand that there is that very-- there are studies that show there's clearly something
we know that the quality of the eggs decline and therefore the outcome might not be as
good as if we did it earlier and of course the number of eggs also becomes fewer after
once you are 40 and therefore you might end up doing more than one cycle, multiple cycles
to freeze the desired number of eggs to get a reasonable outcome later on.
The standard period for which eggs can be kept frozen is a maximum of ten years. However,
there are certain conditions or circumstances in which they can be stored up to 55 years.
Conditions like if you're likely to be prematurely infertile due to treatment of chemotherapy
for cancers. Your clinician can help you decide which category or help you extend your storage
if you fall into the category where it is eligible, but it is very important to understand
that at the moment for social egg freezing or for elective egg freezing, the maximum
storage period is 10 years.
The cost of freezing eggs is very variable. It does depend on your age and I come back
to the ovarian reserve, your ovarian status. So someone who's younger or in early 30s and
has got a very good ovarian reserve, we're likely to do only one cycle and we'll get
the desired number of eggs frozen in one single cycle to have the best possible outcome later
on and someone who does it a bit later, say late 30s or 40s will might have lesser number
of follicles, less number of eggs collected per cycle and therefore we would recommend
them to do the batching cycle. So doing three cycles and batch and collect eggs from each
cycle. So you can imagine the medication used will be three times and the cost will be much
more for a person who's doing later on than to earlier on. The amount of medication used
is less so because of the variability of every individual and the variability of number of
eggs collected, the amount of medication used, the costing is different for every individual.
We take every one as an individual person so everything will be kind of tailor-made
for yourselves and therefore it's very difficult to give you overall costing for anyone.