MOVE OVER, MENOPAUSE
▶ British company ProFam claims a new treatment can delay menopause by up to 20 years. Sophie Prideaux asks if it’s too good to be true
For women, the menopause is a natural part of getting older, but the mental and physical changes it can bring are not always welcome. While some women experience few or no side effects, for many a drop in oestrogen levels can result in several related health problems and unpleasant symptoms, including risk of cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and vasomotor effects, as well as low moods and other unwanted physical changes, such as weight gain and hot flushes. So this month, when British company ProFam announced a new treatment that allows women to delay the onset of menopause by as many as 20 years, it got people talking.
The main purpose of the treatment is to mitigate the nasty effects menopause can have, ProFam says, but there is a possibility that it could also lead to prolonged fertility for women, allowing them to have children well into their fifties and even sixties.
The procedure involves performing keyhole surgery to remove a small piece of ovarian tissue, which is then sliced up and frozen at extremely low temperatures, allowing it to be preserved for several years. When a woman reaches menopausal age, the tissue is thawed and grafted into the body to restore dropping hormone levels. Ovarian tissue cryopreservation – the technical term for this treatment – is not new. Doctors across the world have been performing the procedure on young women for years. However, it has largely been used to help cancer sufferers who face chemotherapy to preserve fertility, giving them the option to conceive later down the line if they make a full recovery.
While there is limited research into the success of this treatment, a study published in 2017 found that, while the operation was still in its experimental phase, at least 80 babies had been born thanks to reimplanted ovarian tissue. However, the treatment was not offered for the sole purpose of delaying the onset of
menopause, until now. “This is the first project in the world to provide healthy women with ovarian tissue cryopreservation purely to delay the menopause,” the company’s chief medical officer, Yousri Afifi, told The Sunday Times.
Professor Simon Fishel, the co-founder of ProFam and the doctor who pioneered the IVF treatment, added that the treatment had the potential to be significant to any woman wanting to delay the onset of menopause for any reason. ProFam points out that throughout history, women did not live much beyond their fertile years, whereas women today will, on average, live for 30 or more menopausal years.
The procedure costs between £7,000 and £11,000 (up to Dh49,000), and the younger the patient, the longer the effects have the potential to last. For example, ProFam says that tissue taken from a 25-year-old could delay menopause by up to 20 years, whereas tissue from a woman in her forties might delay it by five years.
This has yet to be proven. As a pioneering treatment, there is little solid
evidence that the treatment will guarantee a delay for any extended period of time. “The technology is the same for both fertility preservation and using this approach for extending the [onset of] the menopause,” reads a statement on ProFam’s website. “Given the success with fertility preservation, we believe we are now in a position to offer the opportunity to postpone the menopause.”
So far, nine women in the UK have had their ovarian tissue frozen with a view to delaying menopause when the time comes. According to Dr Fishel, the treatment could help combat rising infertility rates, caused by many women choosing to delay having children until their late thirties in order to pursue a career or other socioeconomic reasons.
The news has been met with mixed reactions from those in the medical field, including doctors in the UAE, with many claiming it is too soon to predict any potential side effects that could come with using ovarian tissue in this way, while other doctors say they believe it will work as intended in the long run.