New study offers baby hope to girls with cancer
GUIDELINES developed by Scottish researchers 20 years ago can identify which girls undergoing cancer treatment are most likely to become infertile.
A new study has found that the criteria, developed by scientists at the University of Edinburgh, can help select which girls will benefit most from freezing their ovarian tissue for use in the future.
Medics believe that the frozen tissue could one day help young cancer survivors to have children of their own, following successful births from tissue taken from adult women.
Some cancer treatments can affect female fertility by bringing on early menopause, meaning that freezing samples of ovary tissue before patients start treatment is the only option.
Lead researcher Professor Hamish Wallace said: “Advances in lifesaving treatments mean that more and more young people with cancer are surviving the disease.
“Here we have an opportunity to help young women to have families of their own when they grow up, if they so choose.”
“Their ongoing refusal in the face of an overwhelming body of evidence in the public domain has greatly aggravated the distress caused to my clients, who want answers from the police as well as justice and accountability.”
Yesterday, Helen Steel, who is suing the Metropolitan Police over a relationship she had with another undercover officer – not one of the operatives officially named yesterday – told the BBC that she believed he was a “real person” when they started to form a relationship in 1990.
“We talked about having children together,” she said. “We talked about spending the rest of our lives together and then he disappeared. I spent years searching. Eventually, I found that actually he’d been using the identity of a child who had been eight years old.
“At that point, my world really fell apart because this person, who I’d known and loved, suddenly I didn’t even know who they were or what their name was.”
She added: “These guys were saying that they loved us, that they wanted to be in our lives for the rest of their lives and yet they knew that their posting was going to be ending in just a few years’ time and that they were going to disappear from our lives and leave us bereft.”