A medical team in Israel has given Girls as young as 5 who suffer from cancer a chance to preserve their fertility after chemotherapy.

Doctors have extracted, matured and frozen eggs from girls that will allow them to become parents when they grow up.

Childhood cancers usually result in cure rates of between 70 and 90 percent but the aggressive chemotherapy which is often needed can render children sterile. The life saving chemotherapy and radiotherapy can cause infertility by destroying the ovaries containing the lifetime stock of eggs or shorten a woman's fertile period.

For the first time Israeli doctors have found eggs in ovarian tissue taken from girls as young as five - and say they will offer the treatment to girls aged three.

They have frozen 167 eggs from 17 girls aged five to 20, in addition to ovarian tissue containing egg producing follicles. The eggs were then cultured to make them viable.

In the case of the five-year-old, who is still receiving therapy for kidney cancer, seven eggs were obtained, one of which was successfully matured.

Ariel Revel from Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem will present full details of his research at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lyon, France, this week.

We were able to extract oocytes \ using needle aspiration from very young girls, he told the European Society of Human Fertilization and Embryology conference in Lyon.

Scientists believe the frozen eggs stand a good chance of producing a pregnancy after being artificially fertilised.

While eggs, ovarian tissue and fertilized embryos can be harvested from female patients who are sexually mature, there have been few options available to children. Many experts had thought eggs in the follicles of young girls before puberty were too immature to be extracted.

The same technique could also be employed
'"/>




Page: 1 2
Related medicine news :

1. Girls Hit Tanning Booths More Than Boys
2. Suppressing A Girls Height In Adolescence Could Lead to Fertility Problems
3. Vitamin D Supplement in Teenage Girls essential in Winter months
4. Vitamin D Supplement in Teenage Girls essential in Winter months
5. Girls Who Undergo Genital Mutilation Can Become Infertile
6. Boys Suffer More Mathematics Learning Disorder Than Girls
7. Sexually Abused Girls Develop Eating Disorders
8. Teenage Girls May Not Need Parents Consent For Abortion
9. AIDS More Prevalent Among Teenage Girls In The US
10. Half The Girls In UK Starve To Stay Slim
11. HIV Positive Girls Face Boycott