SALT LAKE CITY — A local mental health therapist was recently diagnosed with a rare disease that causes infertility, and she is trying to get pregnant despite the small chance of success.

Premature ovarian failure “refers to a loss of normal function of your ovaries before age 40,” according to Mayo Clinic.

Paige Zuckerman, 31, said she has the hormone levels of a woman in her 50s.

“I have all ... characteristics effectively of a woman in menopause two decades early, and in my case there is no particular known reason for it other than a potential autoimmune factor that has yet to be identified in terms of where it came from,” Zuckerman said.

She and her husband have been trying to conceive for a year, and she was diagnosed with the disease a few days after Christmas, she said.

Zuckerman formerly used a type of birth control called Implanon, an implant inserted underneath the skin of one’s arm, and didn’t experience any menstrual cycles after it was removed. Her doctor told her that in the worst case scenario she had possibly gone into an early menopause, but that occurs in about 1 percent of women her age.

“Three weeks later, we get back the test results that indicates that that is in fact what has happened,” Zuckerman said.

She and her husband are doing infertility treatments, but it looks like their odds of conceiving using infertility treatments aside from in vitro fertilization with a donated egg is approximately 5 percent or less, she said.

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“Right now we’re doing fertility medications, which are generally not in the scientific and medical world considered to be highly effective with this condition, but I have a very creative doctor who is just kind of trying to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” Zuckerman said.

If attempts are unsuccessful, Zuckerman said they will look into IVF with an egg donor, adoption and surrogacy.

“We’re looking at, for the cost of just conceiving a child and the possibility of carrying one, not even accounting for the possibility of miscarriage, paying about four or five times what normally people will pay to have a child,” she said.

She is a member of some Facebook groups for women with ovarian failure, which she said has been helpful.

The disease will affect her endocrine system for the remainder of her life, and she will be on hormone replacement therapy for the next 20 years.

“It’s good to have a community of people that I can talk to about medications, about side effects, about symptoms,” she said.

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