Answer from:
Every case of the egg freezing process is individual; how someone responds to the medications depends upon their age as well as their ovarian reserve testing. The medications that are used are medications that are typically FSH. FSH is a hormone that’s made naturally from the brain and stimulates the ovary to make an egg. But in a woman’s natural cycle, she’s only going to select one egg. So what we do to create or to have multiple eggs being formed by the ovaries is to use this hormonal medication which consists of FSH to stimulate the ovaries to make multiple eggs so she can make multiple changes to having eggs frozen in the future.
The biggest side effects of the medications I always tell people are a couple. Here in the US, the medications are expensive, in Europe, the medications aren’t too expensive. The other thing is that they are injections that you have to take every day for about 10 to 12 days. Then finally, the biggest medical concern is if a woman makes too many eggs, then you have to worry about the syndrome called Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome which can lead to bloating and the feeling of being uncomfortable for about a week after the eggs are retrieved and in very rare cases, a woman could end up in the hospital with severe dehydration.
So we try to avoid making too many eggs but the right number of eggs is individual and is based upon a woman’s age. Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome does not happen quite often it’s less than 5% of cases. The key is to recognize people who are at risk for Ovarian Hyperstimulation. These are, for example, someone who has the polycystic ovarian syndrome, they’re at higher risk for developing Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome so you want to tailor your stimulation protocol to a lower amount of medications so that she doesn’t make too many eggs. But that’s very rare, particularly nowadays.
When we give the final instructions to the eggs there is something called a trigger shot. Previously that trigger shot was HCG. HCG lasts in the body for about seven days. So women who were at risk for Ovarian Hyperstimulation their ovaries are still stimulated for seven days even after the eggs are retrieved. Now we use a medication called a GnRH agonist. And what that does, it mimics the natural LH surge that a woman has when she’s about to ovulate. So we give this trigger GnRH agonist your LH levels go, up gives the final instructions for maturation to the eggs, and then the next day the levels are back to normal so that the risk of Ovarian Hyperstimulation is minimal to none using the GnRH agonist.
Answer from:
Protocols for egg freezing are not too different to the ones used for IVF treatment. The ovaries are usually stimulated in the similar way where you’re given injections to stimulate those to grow more than one follicle and then these injections or the effect of these injections on your is monitored by blood tests and scans to see how you’re responding to this medication and how we can tweak things around a bit to optimize the stimulation for you. The protocols are pretty similar but with egg freezing, the younger the easier or the more straight forward the protocols tend to be.
Answer from:
You can we can introduce a few modifications to the original ovarian stimulation protocol for General IVF. You will be injecting yourself with hormones that’s exactly the same but now because we don’t have to do an embryo transfer, we don’t have to prepare endometrium receptivity for a transfer. We can also use progesterone derived medications that can be given orally so that’s much more convenient and you don’t have to inject twice for example. That’s something that we are using much more now with egg freezing when it comes to oncological patients. We have to also introduce some drugs that reduce estrogen levels such as letrozole and that’s important in the case of breast cancer patients that have hormone dependent disease and then that we know will have to keep the estrogen levels down. We can managed to do that with the the aid of letrozole which is a drug that reduces estrogen levels. Apart from that it’s very similar to a generale ovarian stimulation for for IVF but we tend to be a bit more convenient because we can introduce some modifications in the medication form of oral instead of injections.
Answer from:
Hormonal stimulation for egg freezing is the conventional one that we use during IVF treatment in any other case. That means that a woman that is treated for egg freezing gives herself injections for around ten days. And during this treatment, we perform a scan, as well as the measurement of hormones at least twice. We now have modified protocols with lower doses, as well as tablets – this is a so-called mild or modified simulation. This is another way to go. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the number of oocytes that can be retrieved in a modified cycle is lower than in the conventional one.
