FAIRFAX, Va., March 2 Genetics & IVF Institute (GIVF) is launching a Personal Egg Banking service in the Washington, DC area to help women 40 and under who want to cryopreserve (freeze) their eggs now for use in the future when they wish to become pregnant. The age of a woman's eggs dramatically affects her ability to conceive. At 30, a healthy woman has about a 20% chance per month of conceiving, but the likelihood of pregnancy plummets as a woman grows older. At 40, her chances drop to about 5%.
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"Many patients with age-related infertility are very distressed because they did not fully understand how difficult it would be to conceive at an older age," says Dr. Lawrence Udoff, a reproductive endocrinologist at GIVF. "Some of these women weren't ready to have a child when they were younger because they had not found a partner or they were immersed in their careers. Now that they are ready, they are facing age-related infertility."
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"We can now offer younger women a new option to help them preserve eggs until they feel ready to become mothers," Dr. Udoff said. "Experience so far with frozen eggs predicts that a patient in her 40s would significantly improve her chances of a successful pregnancy if she were to use eggs that were frozen when she was in her 20s or 30s."
When a woman who has had her eggs banked (also known as elective oocyte cryopreservation) is ready to become pregnant, eggs are thawed. Following the thaw, the eggs are combined (through in vitro fertilization) with sperm either from a donor or a partner and the resulting embryos transferred to the mother to achieve pregnancy.
Until recently, obstacles to success with egg freezing included ice crystal formation. New techniques have enabled a dramatic improvement in egg survival, fertilization rates and pregnancy rates.
Founded in 1984, Genetics & IVF Institute is responsible for numerous key innovations to help couples have healthy babies and has created more than 20,000 pregnancies worldwide.
GIVF's main offices and laboratories are located in Fairfax, VA. GIVF also owns medical or laboratory facilities in Texas, Minnesota, California, Mexico and China.
For more information, visit http://www.givf.com.
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SOURCE Genetics & IVF Institute
