Eggs from cancer patients as young as five frozen

CANCER patients as young as five have had eggs extracted and frozen in the hope they can have children as adults.

While 70 to 90 per cent of childhood cancers are now cured, aggressive chemotherapy can damage survivors' fertility.

Israeli doctors have frozen the eggs of 18 cancer patients aged five to 20, in what is believed to be a first. They removed ovarian tissue and eggs, matured them and froze them. It will be many years before they know whether the eggs will lead to a birth.

Ariel Revel, from the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem, will present the findings at a European conference on human reproduction this week.

He told The Age from Lyons, France, last night that the technique was performed only on patients who had aggressive chemotherapy.

"It was only for patients who are facing very strong cancer treatment that would probably render them infertile immediately or very soon after the chemotherapy," he said. By freezing ovarian tissue and eggs, patients would have two options for fertility treatment as adults.

"We should be open and should be offering this on a very cautious basis, because we cannot promise anything," he said. "However, this project does give a lot of hope to parents and the patients themselves, as we are discussing issues of fertility many years from now."

In adult women, hormones can be used to stimulate the ovaries to produce eggs, which can then be removed. But this is not possible in girls who have not reached puberty, because their eggs are not mature. Overall, scientists attempted to mature 130 eggs in vitro, and were successful with 41.

In Australia, no clinic is believed to have tried freezing children's eggs, but the Melbourne IVF clinic has removed the ovarian tissue of cancer patients as young as nine.

Clinical associate professor John Heath, of the Royal Children's Hospital Children's Cancer Centre, said the Israeli finding was encouraging. But it was important to distinguish between the ability to freeze eggs and the ability to thaw them and produce an embryo.

Professor Heath said most children with cancer who were cured maintained their fertility. He said it wasn't "ethically appropriate" to offer this procedure to such young children when it was still experimental.

"For those where infertility is a real issue, unfortunately for many of those patients urgency of treatment and the need to focus on survival first of all precludes doing these sort of things," he said.

Manuela Toledo, a director of Melbourne IVF, said consent was a vital issue. She said the clinic had no plans to start freezing children's eggs.

theage.com.au

Is it ethically and morally acceptable for the eggs of very young girls to be frozen, even in such extreme circumstances?