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TEL AVIV, Israel, Jun 28, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- An Israeli woman made sterile by cancer treatment has given birth, the result of doctors implanting a frozen sample of her pre-chemotherapy ovarian tissue.
The unidentified woman was in her mid-20s when intense cancer chemotherapy halted her egg production, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Monday, at age 31, she gave birth to a 6-pound, 7-ounce girl outside Tel Aviv.
Doctors had extracted healthy tissue from her ovaries and stored it in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 320 degrees. Two years after the woman underwent chemotherapy and was determined to be disease-free, the ovarian tissue was thawed and reinserted laparoscopically, said Dr. Dror Meirow, who headed the project.
Each year approximately 600,000 women under the age of 40 are diagnosed with cancer in the United States, and more than 80 percent of them become sterile as a result of radiation and chemotherapy.
The case will be fully documented in an upcoming issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Copyright 2005 by United Press International.
