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Infertile patients cannot afford to wait for treatment while their eggs get older.

Dr. Sherman Silber, Infertility Center of St. Louis, is offering video consultations for patients who need to plan now for their treatment while stay-at-home orders are in place. He is talking to and evaluating patients in their home to comply with social distancing measures.

Dr. Silber is discovering that patients actually prefer this method of telemedicine consultation over the conventional office visit. Patients have conveyed that “it is so much more convenient and less stressful” to have a telemedicine personal consultation than to take a day off from work to travel to the doctor’s office and sit with other nervous patients in the waiting room.

The COVID-19 pandemic is thus changing much of the way we will do things in the future, and for the better. “Our patients are surprisingly much happier with this approach. Of course, at some point we need to perform hands on treatment. But with this new manner of seeing patients, we can come to the right diagnosis and treatment plan for most patients more efficiently, quickly, and painlessly, with no loss of personal one-on-one communication.” This is a very welcome new era of telemedicine that has been forced on us by the current difficult times.

Ovarian Tissue Freezing

Preservation of Future Fertility Through Ovarian Tissue Freezing

A relatively new approach to preserving a woman’s fertility is ovarian tissue freezing. This technique was originally developed to preserve the fertility of young women undergoing cancer chemotherapy and radiation. These chemical and radiation treatments often destroy the ovaries, as well as a woman’s chances for bearing children. In these patients, the ovary can be removed, tissue carefully dissected with microsurgery, frozen, and subsequently transplanted back to the woman after she has been cured of the cancer.

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This technology is also an option for the woman who wants her own genetic child, but does not anticipate starting a family for many years. As women get older, a thousand of their eggs degenerate every month, and the eggs which do not degenerate are less fertile with each succeeding year because of the aging process. By age 40, the likelihood that a woman can produce eggs capable of resulting in a baby has decreased significantly because it is very likely that she has run out of most, if not all, of her fertile eggs. Therefore, women who find themselves not yet married at age 35, but who still want to have children in the future, all feel the relentless ticking of the biological clock. Ovarian tissue freezing is a new solution for these women who feel that by the time they do get married, or are otherwise ready to start a family, they will have lost all of their fertile eggs due to the aging process.

All of a woman’s eggs can be found in the thin 1mm outer layer of the ovary, while the inside of the ovary is simply a pulp of blood vessels with no specific organization or function other than to feed the eggs and follicles that are located on the periphery. This structure makes it possible for an entire ovary to be removed and the periphery dissected off microsurgically.The ovarian tissue is then put through a computer controlled, gradual freezing process. It is preserved for future transplantation back to the woman when she is older and ready for a child, but would otherwise have run out of time for getting pregnant with her own eggs.

Learn more about Preserving Your Fertility

Learn more about Ovary Transplantation

Learn more about Fertility Preservation for Cancer Patients 

If you have any questions, you may call us at (314) 576-1400.

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