A safety reserve for later pregnancy

Egg banking can be used, to give an example, when a young woman definitely wants children, but only at a later stage in her life (social freezing).

Eggs can also be retrieved and stored before chemotherapy or radiotherapy. In this case, enough time for the preceding stimulation cycle must be anticipated. If this is not possible, in exceptional cases ovarian tissue can be preserved. Please do not hesitate to talk to our doctors about this.

In order for social freezing to give realistic chances of a later pregnancy, current studies suggest that a reserve of approx. 25-30 ripe eggs are needed. Several egg retrieval cycles are therefore recommended. Here, as with other procedures, the best results are to be expected for women under 35 years old.

Of course, it is also possible to create a cryo-reserve of sperm. In particular, this procedure is recommended for all patients undergoing radiotherapy or chemotherapy to treat a malignant condition. Cryopreservation in such cases is possible on short notice.

Age does not have such a marked impact on success rates with the cryopreservation of sperm samples.

FertiPROTEKT (www.fertiprotekt.com) is a collaboration between university hospitals, clinics and practices in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The project aims to provide men and women, but also children and adolescents, who are undergoing treatments that involve a potential loss of fertility, with the opportunity to be fully informed and be treated as appropriate. This also applies to advising and treating women and men who want to preserve their fertility for non-medical reasons (social freezing).