Moaza Al Matrooshi, a 24-year-old woman born in Dubai, has become the first woman who has had a successful pregnancy and has given birth thanks to frozen ovarian tissue when she was a child, before puberty.
She had to undergo as a child a chemotherapy process that affected her fertility and after staying 13 years frozenThe doctors were able to restore fertility, which allowed him to give birth to a healthy child last Tuesday at the Portland Hospital, London.
When I was just a child, Moaza was diagnosed with beta-thalassemia, a blood disorder that reduces the person's ability to carry oxygen in the blood. As a result, she had to undergo a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy sessions that would affect the possibility of being a mother in the future by 99%.
Although it was a pioneering procedure 15 years ago, his mother had read about the possibility of freezing ovarian tissue in those cases, so he talked to doctors and they decided to remove and freeze his right ovary.
After staying 13 years in cryopreservation, the doctors gradually transplanted fragments of ovarian tissue into the woman and made her functional again. He went from being menopausal to having the function of the ovary of a normal 20-year-old woman. Because the tissue belonged to the patient herself, there was no risk that the immune system would reject it.
The hormones worked again and he had his period again. After three months of trying to conceive naturally, to increase the chances of success, underwent an in vitro fertilization process, through which two embryos were implanted earlier this year.
After waiting for so long, they finally had a healthy baby: "It's like a miracle. We've been waiting so long for this result: a healthy baby," the mother told the BBC.
Girls' ovarian tissue
Richard Anderson, professor of reproductive science and head of the obstetrics and gynecology section of the University of Edinburgh, highlights the hope that awakens the possibility that girls' ovarian tissue can be frozen before they reach puberty when they must undergo cancer treatments or other diseases that affect fertility.
"The demonstration that frozen ovarian tissue can be used in childhood for subsequent fertility is indeed a world first, although there are currently 100 babies born to women whose ovarian tissue had been stored in adulthood."
As explained by The Guardian, since 2001 up to 60 women have managed to become mothers thanks to the freezing of ovarian tissue, but it isat the first time it happens with frozen tissue being a girl. So far, the case of a younger woman who was known, was that of a girl who had frozen her eggs when she was 13 years old.
