A 24-year-old woman has given birth months after receiving an ovarian transplant from her identical twin sister.
The baby was conceived naturally, without help from techniques such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), says the report in The New England Journal of Medicine’s online edition.
“The possibility of ovarian transplantation in humans is receiving increased attention,” say the researchers at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis. “Some centers offer to bank ovarian tissue of young patients with cancer, with the aim of restoring fertility by transplanting thawed ovarian tissue after they are cured or in long-term remission.”
“If ovarian transplantation is proven to be safe and effective in humans, fertility preservation might become readily available for young women who need to delay childbearing for medical or social reasons,” says the report.
Last November, Dutch researchers reported that they had successfully transplanted a 29-year-old cervical cancer patient’s ovary into her arm. The ovary, removed before cancer treatment, produced hormones normally in the woman’s arm.
The arm was chosen for convenience. If the woman wanted to get pregnant, she would need reproductive technology, and it would be relatively easy to harvest her eggs from her arm, Dutch researchers told WebMD last fall. That woman had not tried to conceive due to her cancer’s return, doctors reported last fall.
Another woman who was thought to be sterile after treatment for Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes, reportedly got pregnant after an ovarian graft, say Silber and colleagues. The woman had banked her own tissue, but there are questions about whether her pregnancy was due to the graft or to tissue near the graft, says Silber’s report.
Reference – WebMD, The New England Journal of Medicine
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Woman Has Successful Ovary Transplant to Arm
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