You may be considering fertility preservation if you wish to delay having children but want to safeguard your fertility as you age. Alternatively, you may be about to start medical treatment that has the potential to affect your fertility, such as chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. In these situations, we can expedite your procedure to align with upcoming treatment timelines, particularly where timely medical care is paramount.
There are a variety of reasons our female patients consider freezing their eggs or ovarian tissue, such as wanting to establish your career first or not being emotionally ready for motherhood yet. Now may not be the right time to grow your family but you want to retain the power of choice in the future.
Because egg quality declines with age, we recommend freezing your eggs as soon as you have made the decision.
Egg freezing is also known as oocyte vitrification or oocyte cryopreservation. It involves four steps:
To increase the number of eggs available for collection and storage, we stimulate your ovaries with hormone medications. This encourages them to produce more than the typical one egg per month.
When our ultrasound scans identify that your eggs are ready to be retrieved, you’ll administer another hormone medication, commonly called the trigger shot. This matures your eggs and prepares them for collection. Egg retrieval involves a minor surgical procedure where a fine needle guided by ultrasound is used to collect the eggs directly from your ovaries.
Vitrification is a specialised technique which involves extremely rapid cooling with liquid nitrogen. When a cryoprotectant solution is used, flash freezing prevents your eggs from developing ice crystals that could damage them.
Your vitrified eggs are stored in liquid nitrogen under tightly regulated conditions in a cryobank facility at Genea Fertility. Modern vitrification techniques means that they can be safely stored for many years until you’re ready to use them.
An alternative fertility preservation solution for females is cryopreservation of ovarian tissue.
Ovarian tissue cryopreservation is often considered by young women or girls who have not yet reached puberty, whose future fertility may be at risk from medical treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation, or from premature ovarian insufficiency. These situations can be particularly confronting for these individuals. Our entire team at Flow Fertility is committed to providing evidence-based guidance with compassion and sensitivity.
When the time is right, the frozen ovarian tissue can be thawed and transplanted back into your body. All the immature eggs contained within that tissue sample can then continue to develop and be collected for IVF.
As male fertility is not as significantly affected by age compared to that in women, the main reason men consider sperm freezing is to preserve their fertility prior to undergoing a medical treatment with potential risks to sperm. Such treatments can include chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, or testosterone therapies.
Sperm cryopreservation is also used for men who are unable to produce a semen sample on the day of their partner’s IVF, ICSI, or IUI treatment, as well as for those who may be at a higher risk of damage to their fertility due to occupation or lifestyle.
We can organise a private andrology suite for you at a Genea clinic for you to produce a semen sample. Alternatively, you can produce this sample at home but it must be transported to the labs at Genea within the hour.
Your semen sample is mixed with a cryoprotectant solution, which helps to increase their survival rate and preserve DNA integrity. Once separated into specialised vials, they are frozen with liquid nitrogen.
Your sperm samples are stored in the cryobank facilities at Genea under carefully monitored conditions to ensure their security. In this environment, sperm can remain safely frozen long-term.
During an IVF or ICSI cycle, we typically collect and fertilise more than one egg. However, only one embryo is chosen for transfer. You may choose to freeze the remaining embryo to use if the first transfer is not successful or for use in the future when you’re ready for another child.
An embryo created through assisted reproduction is frozen with the vitrification technique, usually around five or six days after fertilisation (the blastocyst stage). All your frozen embryos will be stored securely in a cryobank, safely immersed in liquid nitrogen.
