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Cryopreservation
Overview
Be it to concentrate on your career, due to financial instability, medical reasons (women about to undergo chemotherapy often choose to freeze their eggs), relationship factors or the time just isn’t right, delaying pregnancy is not something new. However, as a woman gets older, her eggs lose their ability and efficiency in leading to a pregnancy. This is where we step in.
Medical advancements have now allowed you to preserve your eggs or fertilized embryos left from IVF cycles by “freezing” them for future use. SFA offers both egg freezing and embryo freezing under the treatment option called Cryopreservation.
The egg freezing process starts similar to IVF, with a course of injections to stimulate the ovaries so several eggs can be collected, followed by the normal egg collection procedure. Once the eggs are collected, we use the latest cryopreservation techniques known as vitrification to freeze and store your eggs for using them later.
As for the embryo freezing option, after a cycle of IVF, there are often surplus, high-quality embryos, that were not transferred fresh. This could be due to various reasons-
- There were simply too many embryos formed
- It was not medically possible to transfer any embryo in this cycle but still has a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy
Quick Enquiry
In which cases is cryopreservation recommended?
- Before initiating cancer treatment as chemotherapy may result in damage to the eggs
- Women of childbearing age who choose to delay having children for various reasons (also called Social Egg Freezing)
- Other health-related reasons. For example- When ovaries need to be removed
For how many years can eggs/embryos be stored?
In a secure monitored liquid nitrogen tank, they can be kept cryopreserved for 10 years in the first instance and even up to 55 years in total in certain situations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Embryo freezing or cryopreservation lets embryos be stored by cooling them to a very low temperature (-196 degrees Celsius) and keeping them in liquid nitrogen. During the freezing process, the embryos are placed in solutions that eventually remove water from their cells. This protects them from damaging ice crystal formation during freezing. Vitrified embryos have better post-thaw survival rates and can result in higher pregnancy and live birth rates. When thawed, they are placed in a different series of solutions to add water back to the cells for usage. These thawed embryos can then be transferred into the uterus during a frozen embryo transfer cycle for another attempt at pregnancy- all without having to undergo an entire IVF cycle again. This significantly reduces the treatment cost and leaves no room for risks through oocyte retrieval and ovarian hyperstimulation.
No. Not all patients will have extra embryos for cryopreservation or good-quality eggs. Only certain embryos and eggs are frozen as poorer quality ones do not survive the freezing thaw cycle.
They can be used in the very next cycle, or for a future sibling much further down the road. These eggs and embryos stay intact for several years. Whatever your reason, we are ready when you are.
