This Chatelaine article delves into new research with regards to timing your egg freezing. The analysis found that women who pursue egg freezing in their early or mid-3os can often retrieve — and preserve — a promising amount of healthy eggs. However, if they start trying to conceive in their late 30s, they’re often able to reproduce without using their frozen eggs — making the cost and labour of egg freezing unnecessary.

On the other hand, the article notes that women who pursue egg freezing in their very late 30s, or early 40s, have a less successful chance of retrieving healthy eggs — which means the expense of egg freezing may not be ultimately worth it.

The study suggests that, in general, the optimal age to freeze your eggs is 37: it’s likely to result in the preservation of healthy eggs, and your odds of actually using those eggs are higher.

However, if you’re considering egg freezing, talk a fertility doctor about whether any individual factors (such as cancer treatments, premature reduction of fertility, etc) should sway that number.

The post When is the optimal age (medically and financially) to freeze my eggs? appeared first on Fertility.ca.

Women who are not yet ready to start a family may choose to freeze their eggs to keep the option on the table for longer.

There has been significant promise, but also significant disappointment, with egg freezing to date. The disappointment stems from the relative lack of success rate data. Many more women are freezing eggs than thawing them. And until they are thawed, how do we know how successful the treatment really was?

At first, the data was generally only coming from egg donors, women pre-selected to have eggs that would be expected to succeed. Significantly less data was available for “social” egg freezing, that is, women who are choosing to delay their reproduction and hope to be able to freeze their eggs in time. The majority of our patients were waiting for the latter data sets to come through, as we tried to keep expectations firmly in check.

We are now finally seeing the numbers, and it appears that for most patients egg freezing works as well as embryo freezing, with success rates often in the range of 60% (see this article for more). This published data fit our internal data suggesting clinical pregnancy rates 55-60% per set of eggs for women under 38.

Egg freezing is promising when we have enough good eggs to freeze. If you are under 38 years old (age being a marker for egg quality) and have been told you should be able to freeze 12-20 mature eggs (ie. you have a good ovarian reserve), and are working with a good lab able to offer vitrification, you may anticipate having three or more fertilized egg develop to blastocysts and a reasonable expectation for pregnancy in the future. No, it isn’t perfect – all things being equal frozen eggs do not work as well as fresh eggs – but with good counselling egg freezing may provide some measure of reassurance that had been missing until now.

For a good video that walks you through the process check out this video, or a more detailed scientific review, see this article.

The post New data on non-donor egg freezing success rates! appeared first on Fertility.ca.