14 DAY TRIAL // Doctors at the Infertility Center in St. Louis managed to facilitate the birth of the first ever baby to be born out of a transplanted ovary. One of the hospital's patients, who entered premature menopause at age 15, received a full ovary transplant from her twin sister and managed to give birth to a health baby girl on November 11th, when she is 38 years old. The accomplishment was detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Sherman Silber, who was in charge of the entire transplant procedure, said that, although this type of operation had success in the past as well, this case was different because the patient managed to keep her fertility many years after the transplant, whereas other women lost their ability to have children after just three years, due to the lack of blood flow through the outer layers of their ovaries.
Another discovery that the research team made is the fact that ovaries can be frozen indefinitely, after which time they can still provide women with a few extra years of fertility. Silber says that this method could be used by women who want to remain fertile after the age of 43, when 95 percent of females become unable to have children.
"One is the young cancer patient who is about to lose all her ovarian function as she's about to undergo chemotherapy. We just take that ovary out, freeze it and transplant it back. That's one big payoff," the scientists argue. "If she's 40 or 45 when she has it transplanted back, it's still a 25- or 30-year-old ovary, so she's preserving her fertility. We've actually done it for quite a few patients. I think there will be many more women who will want to do that."
This level of health care is unprecedented, and doctors say that cryogenics could still have some wonderful discoveries in store for us. In the future, we might see the same procedures applied on kidneys or lungs, which could prolong life by at least a couple of extra years.