Two-Year-Old Girl With Cancer is Youngest to Have Eggs Frozen to Preserve Fertility

A two-year-old girl with cancer becomes the youngest patient to have her eggs frozen to preserve her fertility.

The young girl has become a beneficiary of a new technique, carried out in the UK, to allow very young cancer patients to put their “fertility on ice” while they undergo gruelling treatments, which can leave them infertile.

Researchers have been studying these techniques to preserve fertility in all age groups, and around 50 babies have been born worldwide following successful ovarian tissue freezing. However, very few options are available for younger girls who have not yet reached puberty.

Now, experts at Oxford Fertility and Oxford University has managed to successfully extract immature eggs from young girls, grow them in the lab until they were mature, and then immediately freeze them for a future date.

They also froze ovarian tissue hoping to potentially transplant it back into the girls in the future, as their bodies start producing their own eggs.

The study involves 15 young girls, aged two to 17, and eight women aged 22 to 31, in the research done between 2013 and 2015. Ovarian tissue and immature eggs were removed, and the eggs matured in the lab using an established technique known as in vitro maturation (IVM), which could avoid the risk that potentially cancerous cells are reintroduced to a woman at a later date. The resulting mature eggs and the tissue were then frozen by scientists.

Experts were able to extract immature eggs in 80 per cent of the children and 75 per cent of the women in the group, and were able to freeze 60 per cent of the girls’ mature eggs and 40 per cent of those in the women.

Professor Tim Child, from the University of Oxford and medical director of Oxford Fertility, however, said that it is yet to be determined whether the technique would be more successful than tissue freezing alone, but the team is positive that it would work.

He said the two-year-old girl, who cannot be named, was “definitely the youngest” to have eggs frozen using IVM.

Professor Child said that the “holy grail of fertility preservation” is being able to grow and freeze many eggs.

The findings were presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Helsinki.

Source: Smh.com.au