Woman gives birth using ovaries she had frozen as a child

The UK papers today welcome news of a world first in fertility treatment. As The Guardian concisely summarises: "A young woman in Belgium has become the first to give birth to a healthy baby after having her fertility restored by a transplant of ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen when she was a child". The woman was born with sickle cell anaemia, a serious inherited blood disorder where the red blood cells, which carry oxygen around the body, develop abnormally. This can cause severe pain and organ damage. Due to the severity of her condition, a decision was taken to perform a stem cell transplant. This involves taking blood stems cells from a healthy donor and transplanting them into the recipient's bone marrow. The donor blood stem cells allow the recipient to make healthy red blood cells, white immune cells and platelets. While this offers hope of a cure, it requires the immune system to be suppressed, which usually destroys the functioning of ovaries, leaving patients infertile. A decision was made to take a sample of ovarian tissue and freeze it, to see if could be used at a later date. The hope now is that a similar technique could be used for other teenagers who require potentially fertility-threatening treatment, such as those with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (cancer of the white blood cells). Using frozen ovarian tissue to restore fertility has happened before; however, this is the first time a live birth has followed the use of tissue frozen at...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Medical practice Pregnancy/child QA articles Source Type: news