Egg freezing is the process of retrieving eggs from a healthy woman’s ovaries and freezing them to use later when the woman is ready for conception and pregnancy. It provides an option that protects the future fertility of women who want to postpone having a child to age over 35.
This process is essentially freezing a woman’s eggs at a healthy age and involves stimulating the ovaries with hormones to produce multiple eggs and retrieving the eggs. These eggs are then slowly or fast frozen and stored at below-freezing temperatures to be thawed at a later date. The eggs frozen using this process can be good to use for up to 10 years without any compromise in quality.
The Importance of Egg Freezing
As the age of a woman increases so does the likelihood of chromosomal activities, and the risk of miscarriages, birth disorders, and defects which makes it more difficult to conceive. Women in their 20s and early 30s have better quality and a larger quantity of eggs both of which decreases with an increase in age and as they get closer to menopause.
Most women enter menopause in their late 40s and 50s and their fertility heavily declines in the years before menopause. Egg freezing helps stop the biological clock of women providing an option to have a baby in the future without problems or complications.
How Does Egg Freezing Work?
Once a woman decides to freeze their eggs the doctor checks their medical history with a focus on fertility and performs a range of blood tests to assess hormone levels. Most of the initial steps of this process are similar to the steps of an IVF cycle and it commonly includes:
- Fertility medicines to boost egg production
- Extracting the eggs from the ovaries with a long needle after the eggs are mature using an ultrasound to guide the process.
- After the extraction of eggs from the ovaries the follicular fluid is removed and individual eggs are identified using a microscope and taken for freezing.
- Eggs are commonly frozen using vitrification which is a fast freezing process or the slow freezing method to help cryopreserve eggs.
- Later when the woman is ready for conception the frozen eggs are thawed and injected with a single sperm. After some days these fertilized eggs result in good-quality embryos which are transferred to the uterus using the same way as IVF. Most fertility clinics grow several embryos at once to increase the chances of a successful pregnancy.
Although egg freezing is a great process it is important to know that successful pregnancies are less common with frozen eggs than with fresh eggs. As not all healthy eggs can make it during the freezing process. However, this process still provides a good option for women wanting a later pregnancy as conceiving a child is not easy in the later years.
For more queries you can always consult with the best IVF doctors in Siliguri.
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