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 Jenny Lange, BioNews | 12.01.2025
A UK toddler with a rare genetic condition was the first person to receive a new gene therapy that appears to halt disease progression.
Oliver, now three years old, has Hunter syndrome, an inherited genetic disorder that leads to physical...
By Rachel Hall, The Guardian | 11.20.2025
Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.
Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility...
By Pam Belluck and Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 11.19.2025
Gene-editing therapies offer great hope for treating rare diseases, but they face big hurdles: the tremendous time and resources involved in devising a treatment that might only apply to a small number of patients.
A study published on Wednesday...
By Aisha Down, The Guardian | 11.10.2025
It has been an excellent year for neurotech, if you ignore the people funding it. In August, a tiny brain implant successfully decoded the inner speech of paralysis patients. In October, an eye implant restored sight to patients who had...
