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Women expecting to have children in their late thirties or forties should freeze their eggs if they want to boost the odds, a British fertility expert said Thursday.
Fertility expert Gillian Lockwood told a conference in Glasgow that women thinking of delaying motherhood should freeze their eggs to avoid finding out that they had "missed the boat".
A woman in her forties will have better chances of giving birth using eggs frozen in her thirties than using fresh eggs, Lockwood told the British Fertility Society conference at the University of Strathclyde.
A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have, meaning they age at the same rate she does. Women's fertility is known to plummet after the age of 35.
"It's the age of the egg, not the age of the womb, which determines the miscarriage rate," Lockwood said.
"Once an egg is frozen, it is frozen in time and there is no decay or damage and the chance of healthy pregnancy is about one in four. That is not great, but it is all a normally fertile couple have the old- fashioned way, about a one in four chance every month," Lockwood said.
Lockwood said the practice at her clinic in central England had resulted in four births, but said she was not encouraging people to postpone having children.
Young women undergoing treatment for cancer which could undermine their fertility can have their eggs frozen on Britain's free-care-for-all National Health Service.
Lockwood said women delaying motherhood because they had not found the right partner, did not have enough money or had to care for elderly parents could also resort to the method, though for a price.
Frozen eggs cost on average 100 pounds (147 euros, 187 dollars) a year to store and the success rate for a pregnancy resulting from a frozen egg is the same as for a frozen embryo.
lc/rjm/mh
Health-Britain-fertility
AFP 071959 GMT 09 06
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