Freezing Eggs May Reduce A Woman's Odds Of Success With IVF

With egg freezing being touted as a way for women to potentially expand future childbearing options, the viability of those eggs when they're defrosted is still relatively unknown. The latest bit of guardedly good news is a short report in JAMA indicating that frozen eggs do indeed lead to live births after IVF nearly half the time — but that the odds of a live birth are almost 20 percent higher for IVF using fresh eggs.

The report, by Vitaly Kushnir and his colleagues at the Center for Human Reproduction in New York, is based on a retrospective analysis of success rates that U.S. fertility clinics send to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. In 2013, donated eggs (as opposed to eggs from the would-be mother herself) were used in 11,148 IVF cycles. Most were fertilized and implanted as soon as they were retrieved, while 20 percent had been frozen after donation and were then thawed and fertilized. Kushnir and his colleagues looked at IVF success rates in terms of eventual live births and compared the...