Among our other guiding philosophies at New Hope Fertility Center, having the fertility care options that best meet the needs of our potential patients is another prominent protocol at our clinic.

As we’ve outlined in the past couple of weeks as a response to New York Magazine’s Parents of a Certain Age cover story, New Hope continuously seeks to give all patients struggling with infertility issues a chance, no matter what age or FSH level.  Indeed, in the same way, we’re proud to be able to utilize the most recent method in fertility preservation and freezing eggs and embryos: vitrification.

Many of the concerns involved with a woman’s age include the “ticking” of the biological clock, a term developed from our understanding that as a woman ages so do her eggs as their production slows down and a woman enters menopause.  For this and other reasons, many women choose to freeze their embryos in an effort to prevent running into infertility issues in the future when they decide to have children.  As a matter of fact, many sources will mention the risk of eggs not surviving the freezing method, our vitrification method for freezing embryos boasts a 98% survival rate compared to that of traditional egg freezing methods.

Our vitrification method is also what makes our donor program unique.  Many donor programs require the donor recipient and egg donor to cycle at the same time.  At New Hope, we can freeze donor eggs until the recipient is most ready for the donor egg transfer.  By using vitrification to preserve donor eggs, we ensure our fertility care is playing best to the needs of the patient, while also avoiding overmedication often involved in trying to synchronize cycles.

The International Center for Scientific Debate (ICSD) recently hosted a discussion on fertility preservation in Barcelona for two days along with the Dexeus Foundation for Women’s Health. “Fertility Preservation Update: Consensus Meeting” included clinical professionals and fertility specialists and revealed the latest in fertility preservation technologies and techniques.

While geared towards oncologists and oncofertility, the significance of such a large debate should not go unreported. Meetings of this magnitude highlight the growing popularity and possibilities being developed by fertility doctors around the world, and provide important insights into the growing field. In addition, these discussions emphasize the options available to women who suffer from infertility and provide hope to those wishing to overcome such adversities through safe fertility treatments.

Joint Scientific Director Anna Veiga participated in the event and is an advocate for this new model of scientific debate being held overseas. In a recent interview with Biocat, Veiga stresses the importance of less aggressive treatments in order to avoid hyperstimulation and multiple pregnancies. The ICSD talks, she mentions, are a practical way in getting the world’s leading fertility specialists together in order to discuss the safest protocols and options for patients when it comes to fertility preservation.

The director of our clinic, Dr. John Zhang, recently spoke on oncofertility at a medical center in Westchester.

We couldn’t agree more with Veiga’s viewpoint and we’re excited to hear that fertility preservation was a main topic at the ICSD.

You can read more on New Hope’s safe and innovative fertility preservation protocols here.

In NPR’s special series on “21st Century Families,” recent features focus on the subject of egg freezing and fertility preservation.

Today, as many women choose to pursue their careers, higher education, and other goals before entering the journey into motherhood, they are continually confronted with the biological clock issue. While many women are aware that the quality of eggs decreases as age increases, fertility preservation is progressively being recognized as a healthy alternative among women in their 30s and 40s who have made the choice to wait when it comes to having a family. There is a movement to get women in their 20s to educate themselves on fertility preservation as well, under the assumption that the earlier women are educated, the better they can understand their alternatives (especially during a time issues are being raised in the media concerning the pill).

New Hope Fertility has always made special efforts to help accommodate women who wish to balance a career with the dream of having a family. In particular, because our fertility care options focus on more natural, minimal stimulation protocols, New Hope Fertility patients are able to continue their lives, relatively unhindered by their fertility care.

Additionally, vitrification, a process that previously had low success rates and was somewhat limited to cancer patients hoping to preserve eggs/embryos before seeking treatment is now seeing healthy success rates. Vitrification is a flash freezing method that freezes and thaws the egg at faster rates than previous methods, increasing the cell’s chance of survival. By freezing their eggs/embryos when they are younger, women can effectively preserve their fertility when they are young, to use when they are older and may have otherwise had trouble conceiving.

Although the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology still considers fertility preservation to be in its preliminary stages, NPR’s coverage on the topic along with other media coverage exemplifies the growing awareness among clinics, health professionals, and women about the alternatives available in family planning and infertility prevention. You can read more from NPR here.

A clinical trial, to be launched at Manhattan hospital next month will look into ways that you could preserve the fertility of infant boys who are, for a variety of reasons, at risk for losing their fertility before they are even old enough to produce sperm. The study involves removing testicular tissue from patients who are as young as 1-year-old and freezing it with the hopes that down the road they would be able to create sperm from the frozen tissue.

A pediatric oncologist from the hospital was quoted as saying that, “Up until now, the option of preserving fertility for little boys going through chemotherapy were minimal to none… [the current procedure] is not complicated, but it is experimental… we don’t know yet that it will achieve the promise it holds.” There may soon be a way to get around this.

The study falls into the larger category of what is known as oncofertility, a growing field that looks at cancer and fertility and is not the first center to do this. Doctors in Pittsburgh have already begun freezing testicular tissue in boys earlier this year.

There are clearly many factors that account for a woman’s fertility: physical, physiological, and hormonal, just to name a few — and encompassed therein, one of the most obvious factors is related to how ovaries age. If a woman’s ovaries age well, then she could be one of the lucky women who has no trouble getting pregnant well into her 30s — and if a woman’s ovaries do not age well, then she might be one of the unlucky who has fertility issues even in her early 30s. As science, technology, our understanding of the human body and our knowledge about the genome become increasingly more and more advanced, the difference between someone who will have fertility issues and someone who will not is becoming less and less of a mystery.

While there are ways to test a woman’s current ovarian reserve — that is the number of eggs she likely has left and the amount of time she has on her biological clock — with numbers like FSH, within the past few years researchers are looking into ways that we can use our DNA to predict when a woman’s ovarian reserve will begin to fall off. The areas of interest currently are the Fragile X or FMR1 gene as they are associated with early ovarian aging. An early pioneer in this kind of research, Norbert Gleicher, speculated that with more research on these genes one would be able to get an approximate sense for how much time a woman had left before her ovaries would start aging past fertility and that such a diagnosis would help women plan their lives better. If a woman knew that she could only have kids until she was 32, then that could be an indication that she should look into fertility preservation like egg or tissue transferring. On the other hand, if someone knew that their ovaries would be producing healthy eggs well into their late 30s, then they might be more inclined to delay having kids a little bit longer and get that extra degree that they’ve always wanted.

Of course with the kinds of lifestyle decisions that may hinge on such knowledge, the tests would have to be quite indicative with very small margins of error otherwise they may, in the end, just cause more anxiety and distress than is necessary — and there are many complicated social, cultural, and ethical questions that come into this debate — but while some of those issues may be difficult to grapple with, it is, in the end, a good thing that they are there to be discussed since it is testament to the advancements that we are making in fertility care and biological science. The more we understand ourselves, the more we can be prepared to live our lives to the fullest.