Category: frozen eggs

Fresh Eggs For IVF Offer Slightly Better Birth Outcomes

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fresh eggs

Using fresh donor eggs for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) provides a small but statistically significant advantage in birth outcomes compared to frozen donated eggs, research finds.

The national study in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology was the largest head-to-head comparison of the two IVF approaches, measuring the likelihood of a good perinatal outcome, defined as a single baby without prematurity and with a healthy birth weight.fresh eggs

“Our study found that the odds of a good birth outcome were less with frozen than with fresh, but it was a small difference,” says lead author Jennifer L. Eaton, medical director of assisted reproductive technology and director of the Oocyte Donation Program at the Duke Fertility Center.

“From a clinical standpoint, given that frozen eggs have many benefits such as ease, cost, and speed, the decision to use fresh or frozen donor eggs should be made on an individual basis after consultation with a physician,” Eaton says.

Eaton and colleagues, including senior author Alex Polotsky of the University of Colorado Advanced Reproductive Medicine, studied three years of data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. Nearly 37,000 IVF attempts were analyzed, including 8,381 (22.7%) that used frozen eggs and 28,544 (77.3%) using fresh.

Controlling for factors such as the quality of fertilized eggs and the age of both mother and donor, the researchers found that fresh eggs resulted in a good perinatal outcome in 24% of fertility attempts compared to 22% of the attempts with frozen eggs. Implantation, clinical pregnancy, and live birth rates were all significantly higher among the women using fresh eggs vs. frozen.

“As IVF with donor oocytes has become standard treatment for women with decreased egg supply or advanced reproductive age, there has been an increased demand for donor oocytes, making frozen eggs an attractive option,” Eaton says. “In general, IVF with frozen donor eggs is cheaper and faster than with fresh donor eggs.

Fututiry.org by Sarah Avery-Duke, February 7, 2020

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Source: Time for Families

Opinion – What Happened to All Those Frozen Eggs?

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Frozen Eggs was supposed to be as revolutionary as birth control. It hasn’t lived up to the hype — but it has still changed women’s lives.

Frozen eggs – The potential for egg freezing to allow women to pause their biological clocks is one of the most astonishing developments of recent fertility science. The promise was thrilling: Women could enjoy more time to find the right partners, break up with the wrong ones and become emotionally and financially ready to become mothers.Egg Donations

Enthusiasts even fantasized the technology would promote gender equality by giving women control over their fertility so that they wouldn’t have to scale back their career ambitions during their 20s and 30s. “Freeze Your Eggs. Free Your Career” blared a 2014 cover of Bloomberg Businessweek.

When Facebook and Apple announced that same year that they would pay for egg freezing for employees in a “game-changing perk,” Apple said in a statement, “We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.”

Egg freezing was an act of self-care — and professional advancement — for the modern woman.

“All the talk in the beginning was about how egg freezing would be as big as the birth control pill and liberate women,” said Janet Takefman, a reproductive health psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, who has counseled more than 200 women considering egg freezing.

And women responded to this promise. In 2009, the first year the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology started collecting egg freezing data, 475 women went through the procedure, in which an average of 10 eggs are surgically removed and preserved in liquid nitrogen after 10 days of hormonal stimulation. In 2017, more than 9,000 women froze their eggs.

Now we have a chance to look back and ask: Did egg freezing live up to its hype?

The most obvious question is whether egg freezing worked by allowing women to have children later. Although SART collects data on pregnancy rates using frozen eggs, it doesn’t break out whether women had frozen them as part of in vitro fertilization treatment or fertility preservation during illness, or to delay childbearing. So I contacted four fertility clinics that have been in the field the longest to find out. (I froze my eggs at two of them and haven’t yet thawed.)

nytimes.com, by Sarah Elizabeth Roberts, December 21, 2019
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Source: Time for Families

Lots of Successful Women Are Creating Frozen Eggs. But It May Not Be About Their Careers.

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“Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career,” announced the headline of a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story in 2014. It was the year that Facebook and then Apple began offering egg freezing as a benefit toemployees. Hundreds of think pieces followed, debating the costs and benefits of using frozen eggs in an effort to “postponing procreation” in the name of professional advancement.

In the years since, many more women across the world have  usedfrozen eggs. Many are highly educated. But the decision may have very little to do with work, at least according to a new study. In interviews with 150 American and Israeli women who had undergone one cycle, careerplanning came up as the primary factor exactly two times.

Instead, most women focused on another reason: they still hadn’t found a man to build a family with.frozen eggs

“The stereotype that these ambitious career women are freezing their eggs for the purposes of their career — that’s really inaccurate at the present time,” said Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist from Yale University, and one of the authors of the study, which was presented Monday at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology’s conference in Spain.

Most of these mid-to-late 30s women were already established in their careers by the time they got to the clinic, the study found.

“They weren’t freezing to advance; they were facing the overarching problem of partnership,” she said. This was the case, even among those who worked for companies that offered to pay for the procedure.

by Heather Murphy, New York Times – July 3, 2018

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Source: Time for Families