EGG FREEZING

Introduction:- 

Egg freezing, or oocyte cryopreservation, is a medical procedure. It involves extracting, freezing, and storing a woman’s eggs. This process preserves her fertility for future use. It allows women to delay pregnancy for medical, personal, or professional reasons.

“Chilling for the Future: The Power of Egg Freezing”

• When you are born as a girl with ovaries, your eggs start to decline in quality and numbers as you age. If you are delaying pregnancy for any reason, it’s a good idea to take your eggs out. Then, put them into the freezer to use sometime later in your life.
• It involves stimulating the ovary to produce multiple mature eggs. This is done using daily hormone injection over 10 to 14 days. The goal is to retrieve as many healthy eggs as possible. 
• Once the eggs are ready they retreat in a mini militia invisible outpatient procedure under light sedition.
• And the start of each month a group of eggs comes out of the vault and each egg grows in a follicle. The brain normally sends out Follicles stimulating hormones (FSH)which stimulates an egg to grow .
• The number of eggs that are outside the vault that’s the limit for what you can get for one cycle. This act of getting the eggs to grow is about 2 weeks of hormone shorts.
• Then a surgical procedure that’s an egg extraction , that’s done under anesthesia where the doctor uses ultrasound guided needles to collect eggs directly from the ovarian follicles.
• In the lab the eggs undergo vitrification, a rapid freezing process that replaces water inside the cells with a Cryoprotectant. This prevents ice crystals from forming and damaging the eggs.
• The eggs are then stored in liquid nitrogen at -196° Celsius.

When is the right time:

• It can be a game changer for those women who are purposely delaying their conception .Every woman runs out of eggs at her own unique potential.
• From studies that around 32 to 33 early 30’s and late 20’s is where you still for the average woman have a peak number of eggs and best quality.
• Because you’ll have more eggs and you’ll need fewer rounds of the same cycle to preserve your fertility.

Consequences and risks :-

1. Current evidence demonstrates that planned oocyte vitrification is a low-risk and safe method of fertility preservation to reduce the risk of age-related infertility, even though fertility can’t be guaranteed. Of course, as a medical procedure, SEF has both short-term and long-term medical risks.
2. The most common short-term risk of egg cryopreservation is oocyte hyperstimulation syndrome. It appears in 5% of stimulation cycles. The syndrome is classified as mild, moderate, or severe.
3. Mild and moderate symptoms appear 3–6% of the patients presenting with headache, nausea, irritability, chest pain and an increase in body weight. Severe cases appear in 1–3% of patients and can be potentially fatal with symptoms like vomiting, oliguria and thromboembolism.
4. However,0.1%–2% resulting in blood clots, shortness of breath, abdominal pain, dehydration and vomiting that necessitates admission to hospital.
5. Women who attempt to achieve a pregnancy using their frozen–thawed eggs will be subject to the risks of IVF. These risks include multiple pregnancy, pregnancy-related high blood pressure, premature delivery, operative delivery and infants with low birth weight.

Risks to offspring

 In addition to the harms associated with premature birth and low birth weight, there is evidence of “a slight increase in the risk of congenital structural abnormalities” with IVF,.

Some research suggests that there may be a small but increased risk of cancer and structural cardiac anomalies for these children.19 Further research is needed to confirm the risks to children born of IVF and to determine whether there are risks specifically associated with births from frozen eggs.

Conclusion :-

Changing social attitudes,taboos towards marriage and childbirth have also played a role in the increasing acceptance of egg freezing. Society is slowly acknowledging that women should have the right to choose when and if they want to start a family.

Even developing countries like India are also contributing.This cultural shift is gradually eroding the stigma associated with delayed marriage and motherhood. One trend that has gained reaction is the growing number of Indian women opting to freeze their eggs in order to preserve their fertility and avoid the pressures of the so-called ‘appropriate timing’ for motherhood.

This tendency is a direct result of India’s evolving social, economic, and cultural backdrop, which gave birth to the concept of reproductive freedom. Women were expected to settle down and start families at a young age, frequently at the expense of their personal and professional goals. However, with the advent of globalization, urbanization, and expanded educational options for women, the landscape has undergone a transformation. More women are pursuing higher education, establishing careers, and becoming financially independent before considering marriage and motherhood. Celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Mona Singh, and Diana Hayden have endorsed egg freezing. This has hugely contributed to eradicating the stigma associated with delayed marriage. It also reduces the stigma linked to delayed motherhood. Their influence has helped reshape societal norms and create an environment where women can make decisions without fear of judgment or scrutiny.