Word: egges
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...Angeles clinic wants to bring that hope one step closer to reality by opening the first for-profit egg-freezing operation in the country. "It's like an insurance policy," says Dr. Thomas Kim, medical director of the CHA Fertility Center, which wants to start freezing the eggs of women ages 35 and younger beginning this fall for about $8,000. "If they are willing to do it, we are happy to give them the service...
...center's ambitious plans are sparking a fierce debate among fertility researchers. Is egg banking a godsend for anxious women or a recipe for heartbreak and failure? Kim claims he has the medical results to justify egg banking, and he has several healthy babies to prove it. Critics insist that it will be years before egg freezing will be ready for prime time. "It's a shot in the dark," says Dr. Richard Paulson, chief of reproductive endocrinology and fertility at the University of Southern California's School of Medicine...
...problem with freezing and thawing unfertilized eggs is that it's notoriously hard to do without destroying the eggs in the process. A human egg is a single, liquid-filled cell that is extremely sensitive to temperature changes; ice crystals can easily rupture cell walls, and the solutions used to preserve the egg sometimes wind up destroying it instead. Also, the egg's chromosomes are in a particularly exposed state. If the meiotic spindle--which holds the chromosomes together and pulls them apart as the egg develops--breaks down, as it tends to do when the egg is frozen...
That's why success rates with egg freezing have been so dismal. In Italy, the University of Bologna's Infertility and IVF Center leads the world with an impressive 27 frozen-egg babies. But with more than 600 women each year undergoing the egg-freezing procedure there, the center's past success rates have been as low as 1%. Even Reproductive Biology Associates, the Atlanta clinic where Christia Murdaugh froze her eggs back in 1997, has all but dropped out of the field. Of 30 patients, only two delivered healthy babies. A third had a miscarriage, and the other...
...Eleonora Porcu at the University of Bologna both say recent technical advances have boosted success rates to the same level as embryo freezing, which is about 20%. In Porcu's most recent studies, 70% to 80% of the eggs survived the defrosting process without breaking down. Kim puts the current frozen-egg birth rate at 21%, based on a recently completed study in which 6 out of 28 women in South Korea became pregnant and later gave birth. One even had twins...