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First, let’s talk about two processes. Number one is preparing the uterus to allow the potential embryo to implant. Those medications are pretty straightforward. It’s designed to mimic a natural menstrual cycle. So in a natural menstrual cycle, the first part of a woman’s cycle, she makes a hormone called estrogen. What estrogen does is build up the lining of the uterus to allow for the embryo to implant. And then when she ovulates, she makes a hormone called progesterone. What progesterone does is provides nutrition for the embryo to grow into the placenta takes over about 8 to 10 weeks.
So when we’re preparing a woman’s uterus for receiving embryos after the eggs have been frozen, we want to give her these same natural medications that she makes in her body; we give her estrogen to build the lining of the uterus up. Estrogen can be given in pill form, patch form, or injectable form. Then once your lining is nice and thick, the thickness depends upon the individual doctor. But typically, anything over seven millimeters is thick enough to allow an embryo to implant. Once we see that the lining of the uterus is nice and thick, then she will start her progesterone, and the progesterone is either given in an injectable form or vaginal capsules. Sometimes very rarely can use oral medication for the progesterone, but typically after you start the progesterone, the embryos are transferred 5-6 days after you start the progesterone. Then both the estrogen and progesterone are maintained for the first part of the pregnancy.
Now, following the eggs, it’s important to understand that there’s a shell that surrounds the egg, it’s called the Zona Pellucida. And that can get very thick. And the Zona Pellucide is very important because the sperm have to penetrate the Zona Pellucida in order to fertilize the egg. So a woman who’s frozen her eggs and we thawed the eggs out, that shell can be thickened so the egg has to undergo a procedure called Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, where we take one sperm either partner sperm or donor sperm, and we inject that one sperm directly into the egg to bypass the hardening of the shell to get the egg to fertilize.
Once that egg is fertilized, we let it developed either to what’s called a day 3 embryo stage and is transmitted at that stage or the blastocyst stage which is a day 5 or day 6-stage embryo, and then the embryo is transferred at that point in time. The process of thawing and creating embryos is very straightforward. If you have a good-quality egg that was frozen, you can pretty much predict the survival rates to about 90%. Fertilization rate is anywhere between 80 to 90% as well with the intracytoplasmic sperm injection technique. Then if you’re younger, you have a very good chance of developing a blastocyst and good quality embryo. The randomized trials looking at pregnancy rates of frozen eggs are very good for young, healthy women. But as women get older, the pregnancy rates do decline because of the age of the egg that was frozen. So the younger the egg that was frozen, the better chance you have at a successful pregnancy in the future.
Answer from:
In that case you don’t need to go through another stimulation. We will just prepare the uterus from the lab point: we will thaw the eggs, fertilise & culture them until the day of the transfer. Then you will come for a painless transfer and very easy procedure.
Answer from:
If you have your eggs frozen at a clinic and you want to come to use them, these eggs are thawed and then injected with your partner sperm or donor sperm. Once they’re fertilised, we check the next day and basically these resulting embryos are grown in the lab incubators until the desired stage. It depends on what you would want to do: if you want to undergo genetic testing, for example, on these embryos then those embryos will be grown until the blastocyst stage and tested then. If you want to freeze those embryos which you still can even though they were from frozen eggs you absolutely can do that and that could be done also at the blastocyst stage or at the cleavage stage which is day 2 or day 3 and then you also have the option of obviously transferring those eggs. That can be done again any day from day 2 to day 6 of embryo development.
Answer from:
The process of using the eggs is much simpler compared to egg freezing. We just need to prepare the endometrium to receive the embryo and we can either do that in a hormonal replacement cycle we’ll be taking tablets and using progesterone vaginal pessaries or sometimes we can even do it in a natural cycle if you have regular cycles. That’s very very easy. Once we have the endometrium ready what we do is we thaw the eggs and then we fertilize the eggs with either your partner or donor sperm and then we create embryos. Those embryos will be growing in an incubator in the lab. Once they reach the day 5 stage, blastocyst stage, then you will usually select one for a single embryo transfer. Then if you would wait around11 days, you will know the results whether you are pregnant or not. The rest of embryos can be frozen and that’s not a problem even if they come from frozen eggs because we are not freezing the same. The same thing so, yes and it’s very it’s quite simple supposed to if we compare it with if it would be an ovarian stimulation.
Answer from:
We have the possibility of storing the eggs frozen for a longer time. As soon as the patient decides to use them, then we thaw them in the lab, and we use the sperm of her partner or sperm from a sperm bank in case if the woman is a single mother. Then we leave the embryos being cultured in the lab. So this is a very normal procedure that we use without any risk of damage to the eggs.
