Egg-Freezing: What's the Success Rate?
By Staff Reporter,
BBC News
| 02. 17. 2020
The fertility expert, Lord Robert Winston, appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to discuss the campaign to relax the current ten-year limit on freezing eggs.
Lord Winston, who is professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London, warned that it was "a very unsuccessful technology" and said: "The number of eggs that actually result in a pregnancy after freezing is about 1%." He later clarified he was referring to live births.
But the body which regulates fertility treatment in the UK - the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) - puts the success rate at closer to one in five - a far better chance than the one in a hundred Lord Winston suggests.
So, why the different figures?
It's because the two are measuring the success rate based on different stages of fertility treatment.
An IVF cycle involving frozen eggs goes something like this:
- Eggs which were previously frozen and stored are thawed
- The ones that survive the thawing will be fertilised with sperm
- Eggs that are successfully fertilised start to develop into embryos
- Of the embryos that...
Related Articles
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 03.10.2024
In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He...
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 03.08.2024
Scientists are a step closer to making IVF eggs from patients’ skin cells after adapting the procedure that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, more than two decades ago.
The work raises the prospect of older women being...
By Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, The Scientist | 03.15.2024
Scientists have genetically modified isolated microbes for decades. Now, using CRISPR, they intend to target entire microbiomes.
Humans are never alone. Even in a room devoid of other people, they are always in the company of billions of microscopic beings...
Sheep have been domesticated for roughly 12,000 years. Sheep have also been cloned since 1996; Dolly (pictured) was the first mammal to suffer that indignity. But this news was featured in the March 14 issue of Business Insider:
Montana rancher paid $4,200 to clone a dead sheep and launched a farm of super hybrids worth up to $550,000
Some people — not just Montanans but Texans too and probably others — pay to indulge in “captive hunting,” and large...