How many eggs should be frozen? Would one cycle of egg freezing be enough?

Because the younger eggs are going to have better outcome lesser eggs are needed, so just i’m telling you on the basis of studies although, we never know – it doesn’t apply to one particular woman but I’m just telling you the aggregate of the larger studies because these numbers would not apply to individual women necessarily because everybody can have a very different quality of eggs. So, generally a younger women will have better quality eggs, that means we need lesser eggs when a woman is younger to create one live birth in future but as the women advances, her egg quality deteriorates and this decline can be compounded with by the presence of endometriosis so, an older woman needs to freeze more number of eggs to guarantee the live birth although, nothing guarantees but just to increase the chance of one live birth. There are studies which have told us about what numbers but this should be left on the doctor’s decision, based on the individual patient I would say. The repetition of the cycles is generally required if the freezing is done after 35 years of age and not every follicle has egg and not every egg is mature and we are only going to freeze mature eggs and that is why the need for repeat cycles is there. Generally three cycles in a general population, mean that there should be enough mature eggs but the total number of mature eggs should be decided by the treating doctor for the individual.

It depends on how many eggs can be frozen in one cycle. It depends upon a woman’s egg reserve. And if she has a very good egg reserve, she’s going to be more responsive to the fertility drugs that we use to stimulate the eggs to grow. And with one cycle she may make about anywhere between 10 to 15 eggs. We don’t want to want to make too many eggs. But there’s a range so even young healthy women who want to go to fertility stimulation, on average, they’re going to take about 12 to 15, as you had older, become less responsive to the fertility drugs and make less number of eggs. So if I have a woman who is say 38, and she’s had five eggs retrieved, those may be very good, healthy five eggs. However, the number that she needs to get to they give herself a 50% chance of having one baby in the future should be closer to that 15 number. So she may have to undergo two or three cycles to get to that number that’s going to be beneficial for her in the future.

There is no general rule as to how many eggs should be frozen per patient. Generally speaking it’s a numbers game – the more eggs you have in storage, the more likely one of those would be. However as a rule or recommendation I make for my patients is that having 15 in storage usually gives you at least the highest percentage of success. It’s not to say that having less than 15 eggs doesn’t give you success, in fact I’ve seen so many patients with very few eggs frozen lead to babies or have babies eventually but it’s also important to know that every patient reacts differently to stimulation so sometimes you can just need one cycle to get a sufficient number of eggs but sometimes you may need more cycles to get a good number of eggs.

We recommend at list freeze 15 eggs, but it depends on the ovarian reserve, sometimes the patient will need to have more procedures to reach a good number of frozen eggs.