Preserving Fertility in Two Year-Olds - Ovary Freezing

By Brandie Umar - Executive Director of Content | July 19th, 2010

A two year old girl is the youngest person to have an ovary removed and preserved to prevent infertility caused by chemotherapy. The two year old was due to begin chemotherapy to treat an auto-immune disease.

Chemotherapy can cause infertility in men and women. Recently doctors have started to realise chemotherapy has the same effect on children and have begun to take precautionary measures to prevent infertility later in life from childhood chemotherapy.

Freezing ovaries has become a fertility preservation method offered to many women; however adult women also have the option of freezing eggs as the ovaries are functional. In female children' the ovaries do not produce eggs and the only option to preserve fertility is to preserve the health of the ovary itself.

Doctors remove one of the healthy ovaries and divide this tissue into miniture pieces. The tissue samples are then flash frozen in the same way as

egg or embryo freezing. Once the woman is ready to conceive, the healthy ovarian tissue is then thawed and implanted back into the remaining ovary. The ovarian tissue starts to develop and in as little as four months is functioning as a healthy ovary - producing eggs and making a woman fertile.

The two year old girl is the youngest person to have an ovary removed for fertility purposes however the doctors are optimistic the procedure has a high chance of preventing chemotherapy causing her infertility later in life.

Doctors have begun to use the same logic to freeze testicular tissue in male childhood cancer patients in the hope of restoring fertility to men later in life.