GIVING WOMEN A CHANCE TO TAKE CONTROL
Professor Simon Fishel, founder of ProFam, the Birmingham clinic that pioneered the treatment, explains:
“During keyhole surgery around one third to one half of the outside of a single ovary is removed. This tissue is transported under sterile conditions to a specialist laboratory.
Once in the laboratory, the ovarian tissue that has been removed is thinly sliced into strips. Depending on the age of the woman, these strips may contain hundreds or thousands of potential eggs.
By removing them, in a way you preserve a woman’s fertility. But you also preserve the hormones that produce the eggs and regulate your reproductive cycle. These are your natural, physiological hormones.
We bathe the tissue in nutrients and store it at -150C.
This has all been done on the back of 20 years of work with cancer patients, where doctors removed some ovarian tissue to try and preserve their fertility if they were about to go through treatment.
We know that in 95 per cent of patients who have tissue grafted back into their body, within four to six months they start having their normal cycle.
We felt that a younger generation of women could benefit. You can preserve your fertility allowing you to have children later in life – especially helpful for women who want a baby when they are 40.
But you also preserve hormones – 65 per cent of women do need some clinical support as they go through the menopause. If you were someone who needed HRT, you could choose your own natural hormones instead. Presumably, this is a lot healthier for many women as we know HRT is not for everyone.
This procedure costs between £3,000 and £6,000.
Women are living longer than ever and it’s possible they will spend longer in the menopause than being fertile. We are empowering women to take control of their own health.”