Encouraged by an improved technology with high success rates and committed to community outreach, a White Plains fertility center is offering egg freezing to preserve the reproductive potential of women newly diagnosed with cancer. The service, which normally costs from $8,000 to $10,000, is free of charge for cancer patients.
“We”™re just beginning to offer the egg freezing,” said Dr. Daniel Levine, an in vitro fertilization specialist at Westchester Fertility and Reproductive Endocrinology, which three years ago opened a state-of-the art center offering advanced fertility services at 136 South Broadway. “It”™s really exciting for us.”
Levine, former medical director and founder of the SUNY Upstate IVF Center in Syracuse who in March joined the White Plains center”™s founder, Dr. Michael Blotner, in practice here, said it is the first facility in the region to offer egg freezing to newly diagnosed cancer patients so that they can still conceive a child using their own egg.
For cancer patients in treatment, radiation and chemotherapy “many times will completely destroy a women”™s reproductive potential,” he said. And many women diagnosed with cancer do not have a readily available sperm source prior to treatment and so cannot use the more common technique of embryo freezing. Â
Both procedures are done in combination with an in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle. But in embryo freezing, an already fertilized egg is frozen. With the new technique, an unfertilized egg is frozen and then thawed at a chosen time, fertilized and transplanted to create a pregnancy.
Levine said the egg-freezing option “will greatly empower women who want to achieve pregnancy but cannot or choose not to at a given time. For women with cancer, it is the first viable fertility treatment option.”
The procedure has grown in popularity among healthy career-minded women in their 20s and 30s “who just don”™t want to (start a family because they) ”¦ have successful careers at this point in their lives,” he said. Age, the major factor in significantly reducing a woman”™s egg quality and reproductive potential, need no longer be a major obstacle to pregnancy.
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Levine said the first birth by egg freezing was in 1986. “It”™s been around but the technology of having great success is quite new ”“ I would say about two years.” Breakthroughs in culture media and freezing techniques have served to raise post-thaw viability rates for unfertilized eggs to 80 to 90 percent, he said. Subsequent pregnancy rates are near 50 percent and comparable to pregnancy rates for embryo freezing. More than 200 successful births that began with egg freezing have been documented.
Levine said about 2,000 to 3,000 samples of egg freezing are stored in the U.S. at any given time, “only a small percentage” of the 150,000 IVF samples. But he predicted “an explosion in requests for this service going forward.” As in White Plains, academic and private-practice fertility clinics have begun to offer the procedure for cancer patients, he said.
“We”™re running to catch up with the technology in some ways, but very excited about it,” Levine said. “This is becoming ”˜state-of-the-art.”™ There”™s a pun there ”“ ART is assisted reproductive technology.”
Egg freezing “really represents one of the futures of our field,” he said. The technology could be used to establish egg banks at centers such as Westchester Fertility, where donated frozen eggs from a single donor could be used by several recipients, making the supply of donor eggs much more inexpensive. For women in their 40s and older now looking for egg donor samples, “That is very expensive,” said Levine. “That may cost them $30,000 or more for a donor egg cycle. That”™s part of the problem of fertility treatment ”¦ the cost and expense of treatments.” Â
“We do feel we have an obligation to participate and communicate with the community that we live in and give back,” said Levine. “That”™s why we”™re offering this free of charge.”
For women with cancer, egg freezing “opens up possibilities that were previously unimagined,” he said. The free service also is “a way to celebrate a new era in fertility treatment.”
For more information, call Westchester Fertility and Reproductive Endocrinology at 914- 949-6677.
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