ABSTRACT
PREFACE e developed world is in the midst of a widespread infertility epidemic. Economies in Japan, the United States, southern Europe, and even China are threatened by a decreasing population of young people having to support an increasing population of elderly people and retirees.1 Infertility clinics are emerging throughout the world in huge numbers because of a worldwide decline in fertility as women age and become less fertile.2 In her teenage years, a woman has a 0.2% chance of being infertile, and by her early twenties, it is up to 2%. By her early thirties, it is up to 20%.2,3 Most modern women today do not think of having a baby until their mid-thirties, and by then, over 25% are infertile, simply because of aging and the decline in the number and quality of their oocytes. is is clearly demonstrated by the high pregnancy rate via using donor oocytes from young women placed into the uteruses of older women.2-4
Until recently, oocyte freezing had very poor to no success, and so ovary tissue slow freezing was the only preservation method we could rely upon. Of course, now we also have a favorable option of retrieving oocytes aer ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval, using vitrication instead of slow freezing for cryopreservation.5,6
However, as we will discuss later in this chapter, many programs are not even aware of their terrible results with oocyte freezing because they are either using a brainless commercial product, or they simply are not using the best protocol perfectly. Success with oocyte freezing should be 95%–99%, but most clinics come nowhere near this. We will explain this in this chapter, but meanwhile, we expect that there will be many unhappy “fooled” women complaining about this in the next 5-10 years. Nonetheless, ovarian tissue freezing and transplantation still have great advantages over egg freezing. ere does not need to be a prior delaying stimulation cycle, as ovarian tissue freezing would delay cancer treatment by only a few days. Furthermore, one cycle of ovarian stimulation and egg freezing does not ensure successful pregnancy as much as an entire ovary would, and nally, transplanting ovarian tissue back not only restores fertility, but also restores endocrine function. We hope that in this book and in this chapter, we can clarify this so that all clinics can avoid the confusion of the literatus and get the 95% results that patients expect.
