If you are looking to conceive at a later date, or are intending to undergo medical treatment that could affect your fertility, cryopreservation is a way of preserving your healthy eggs/sperm/embryo to be used for pregnancy later on. Before participating in any method of cryopreservation, you will need to participate in blood studies and other forms of investigations.
Reasons for sperm freezing:
The initial storage period is 1 year or, in cases such as pre-chemotherapy, it will be stored for 10 years.
Reasons for egg freezing:
The egg collection is performed in the same way as for IVF. The eggs are then frozen within 24 hours.
Not all frozen eggs that are thawed for use will be healthy, so it is not guaranteed that they can be used for conception.
Fertility treatments such as IVF often generate more embryos than are needed for the treatment. You may be advised to freeze them for future use.
Embryos can be frozen at various stages of their development- day 1, called the pronuclear stage, day 2/3, called the cell stage, or day 5/6, called the blastocyst stage. More than 70% of embryos survive the thawing process. The embryos are usually stored for a period of 10 years.
This is a very successful method of fertility preservation, significantly more so than egg freezing. Queen’s Clinic are proud to be one of a very elite number of fertility clinics globally who currently offer the service.
This procedure involves removing the outer ovarian layer from your body during laparoscopic surgery, which contains a large number of immature eggs that can be grown and developed using various fertility treatments. This can be hundreds of eggs, compared to only about 10 using egg freezing! In most cases only part of the ovary will be removed, but we may decide that it will be more effective for you to preserve the whole ovary.
This is often recommended to women who are intending to undergo cancer treatments and women with early signs of ovarian cancer.
This treatment is relatively new, but it is already proving to be very successful and we are confident in this procedure.
ICSI is used if your sperm sample quality/quantity is very low and failed to benefit from previous medical treatments. It involves injecting a single sperm cell directly into the egg, to give a much greater chance of successful development. ICSI is recommended if:
Approximately 70% of eggs fertilized using ICSI will successfully result in a pregnancy, making it just as successful as IVF.
If you are interested in any of these procedures, please book an appointment with Queen’s Clinic by phoning us on 020 7935 5540.
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