| Title | Live Birth After Autograft of Ovarian Tissue Cryopreserved During Childhood | |
| Date | Friday June 12 2015, @03:24PM | |
| Author | paulej72 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the not-quite-mother-mary dept. | ||
A Belgian woman has become the first to give birth to a child after having ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen nearly 14 years earlier transplanted back into her body:
The 27-year-old had an ovary removed at age 13, just before she began invasive treatment for sickle cell anaemia. Her remaining ovary failed following the treatment, meaning she would have been unlikely to conceive without the transplant. Experts hope that this procedure could eventually help other young patients. The woman gave birth to a healthy boy in November 2014, and details of the case were published on Wednesday in the journal Human Reproduction.
The woman, who has asked to remain anonymous, was diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia at the age of five. She emigrated from the Republic of Congo to Belgium where doctors decided her disease was so severe that she needed a bone marrow transplant using her brother's matching tissue. But before they could begin the bone marrow transplant, they needed to give her chemotherapy to disable her immune system and stop it from rejecting the foreign tissue. Chemotherapy can destroy the ovarian function, so they removed her right ovary and froze tissue fragments. At that time, she was showing signs of puberty, but had not yet started her periods. Her remaining ovary failed at 15. Ten years later, she decided she wanted to have a baby, so doctors grafted four of her thawed ovarian fragments onto her remaining ovary and 11 fragments onto other sites in her body. The patient started menstruating spontaneously five months later, and became pregnant naturally at the age of 27.
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printed from SoylentNews, Live Birth After Autograft of Ovarian Tissue Cryopreserved During Childhood on 2025-12-16 03:13:39