Individuals or couples may choose cryopreservation to preserve fertility during cancer treatments or delay a pregnancy attempt until some time in the future
OOCYTE CRYOPRESERVATION:
Fight your biological clock!
If a woman decides to freeze her eggs, she must take medications daily for a number of days to stimulate her ovaries to produce many more eggs than normal. This is the same preparation used for an egg retrieval in IVF. Once the eggs are thought to be mature, they are removed from the ovarian follicles and frozen by embryologists in the laboratory. Embryologists most often use vitrification to prepare the oocytes for storage. The oocytes may be stored at the fertility clinic in liquid nitrogen storage tanks or at a commercial cryopreservation bank until needed by the woman or couple for IVF treatments
SPERM CRYOPRESERVATION:
If a man decides to preserve his sperm, he may provide a sample by masturbation to ejaculate. If no sperm is present in the semen or he cannot ejaculate, a surgical sperm extraction may be used to remove sperm directly from the testicle. The sperm sample is then frozen and stored at a fertility clinic or sperm bank until ready to be used for intrauterine insemination (IUI) or IVF.
FERTILITY PRESERVATION BEFORE CANCER TREATMENTS:
Chemotherapy and radiation can damage a person’s fertility during cancer treatment. Cryopreservation allows cancer patients to preserve their fertility with the following options:
- For women, egg freezing (or ovarian tissue freezing for young girls)
- For men, sperm freezing
- For couples (to preserve either partner's fertility), embryo freezing (an embryo is created with the man's sperm and the woman's eggs.
Who should use cryopreservation?
People may choose cryopreservation for a variety of reasons, the most urgent being impending cancer treatments. Chemotherapy and radiation can damage a person’s fertility or cause infertility while killing the deadly cancer cells.
Other reasons to preserve fertility can involve lifestyle, social or career choices. Many individuals involved in careers that are life or fertility threatening choose to freeze eggs, sperm or embryos. Young women can freeze their eggs to ensure fertility and optimum egg age if and when they decide to start a family later in life through IVF.
Benefits of cryopreservation
The primary benefit is insuring a person’s fertility even if he or she will be undergoing harmful cancer treatments, working in a dangerous career, or do not plan to have children for some time. Although future pregnancy cannot be guaranteed, cryopreservation allows for peace of mind about a future family.