01 November,2010 01:54 PM IST | | Agencies
A fertility expert has claimed that women in their 20s should freeze their ovaries if they want to conceive later in life.
Dr Sherman Silber, who carried out the world's first full ovary transplant, said that women in 20s should be thinking of having the procedure now.
Storing one third of an ovary would mean around 60,000 eggs could be captured in the tissue, which could then be transplanted back when the woman is older, Silber said.
Conventional egg freezing, according to Silber, is less effective because every round of egg retrieval results only in five to ten eggs being collected.
"Maybe women are being misled into thinking one cycle of egg freezing is going to give them security - and that''s absolutely not true," The Independent quoted him as saying.
"A woman could freeze her ovary at age 19 and have a 19-year-old ovary aged 40," Silber said.
"People are not trying to have children or are not even thinking about getting married until they are 35. These women come to us aged 35 or 38 after they''ve broken up with their boyfriend of 10 years and they are worried about the future," he added.
But Tony Rutherford, chairman of the British Fertility Society warned that it was too soon to recommend widespread banking of ovarian tissue.
A spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said, "This is a relatively new procedure and is still being developed."
