Monday, July 26, 2010

How young is too young for fertility treatment?

Is two years old too young? Wait, what? Ok, this isn't your routine fertility treatment. This is what is called a fertility preservation procedure. A two year old girl needs to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments which will most likely render her sterile. So her parents have decided to give her a shot at having her own children should she make it to adulthood by having one of her ovaries removed and frozen.

The procedure has been performed quite a number of times, even on very young females. The youngest prior to this one was three years old. It isn't really known if an ovary can be frozen that long and then re-transplanted back into the girl once she has grown up. There have been successes in adult women but the freezing time has been much shorter than that anticipated for the very young patients.

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