Photo by http://www.star-telegram.com/
FORT WORTH, Texas -- Paul Nozell had few doubts as he sat in front of an ultrasound screen watching as two eggs - no bigger than pinheads - were implanted in his wife's uterus.
"Those were the best eggs you could get," he said. "Those two eggs were just perfect."
He was right. On Nov. 27, Garrett and Laura Nozell were born.
Marianne Nozell was 45 when she gave birth to the twins. She and her husband joined the estimated 15 percent of U.S. couples who undergo fertility treatments each year.
Since the first "test tube baby" was born in 1978, assisted reproduction has become a big business. In 2006, it led to more than 50,000 births worldwide.
While Hollywood celebrities have made late-in-life motherhood fashionable, what is rarely publicized is that a woman's odds of getting pregnant with her own eggs after 40 are less than 1 percent, said Dr. Kevin Doody, a reproductive endocrinologist who with his wife, Dr. Kathleen Doody, operates the Center for Assisted Reproduction in Bedford, Texas.
In some ways, donor eggs have made that ticking biological clock obsolete. Donor eggs from a young woman give a 45-year-old the same chance of getting pregnant as a woman in her 20s - baby-making prime time.
An estimated 14,000 babies are born each year in the United States from donor eggs, according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. Use of donor eggs has grown nearly 40 percent since 2000.
One University of Southern California study of motherhood after menopause found that women over 50 could safely have babies using donor eggs. In 2000, there were 255 births to women 50 to 54, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over a 12-month period at the reproduction clinic in Bedford, 71.9 percent of patients using donor eggs gave birth. By comparison, 46 percent of women who underwent in vitro fertilization with their own eggs delivered.
The Nozells' marriage is the first for Paul and the second for Marianne. They considered adoption and tried other fertility treatments before attempting in vitro with donor eggs and Paul's sperm.
"We had already been through a lot of frustration, and a lot of money had been spent with every alternative I could think of," Marianne said. "By then I knew I wanted a donor."
They started by going through a database of donors, then thumbing through photos of smiling women willing to donate their eggs.
The Nozells weren't looking for a model-turned-med student with a 4.0 GPA. They wanted a petite woman, maybe with blond hair like Marianne's.
They also wanted a donor whose eggs had already successfully resulted in a pregnancy. But this knowledge was a double-edged sword. It raised the possibility that their children might run into children from the same woman's eggs - their biological half-siblings.
At some fertility clinics, couples pick their donor from a huge bank of women from around the country. While this widens the search and improves anonymity, it also adds travel expenses to the cost of egg retrieval.
Source: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/264/story/281912.html
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"Those were the best eggs you could get," he said. "Those two eggs were just perfect."
He was right. On Nov. 27, Garrett and Laura Nozell were born.
Marianne Nozell was 45 when she gave birth to the twins. She and her husband joined the estimated 15 percent of U.S. couples who undergo fertility treatments each year.
Since the first "test tube baby" was born in 1978, assisted reproduction has become a big business. In 2006, it led to more than 50,000 births worldwide.
While Hollywood celebrities have made late-in-life motherhood fashionable, what is rarely publicized is that a woman's odds of getting pregnant with her own eggs after 40 are less than 1 percent, said Dr. Kevin Doody, a reproductive endocrinologist who with his wife, Dr. Kathleen Doody, operates the Center for Assisted Reproduction in Bedford, Texas.
In some ways, donor eggs have made that ticking biological clock obsolete. Donor eggs from a young woman give a 45-year-old the same chance of getting pregnant as a woman in her 20s - baby-making prime time.
An estimated 14,000 babies are born each year in the United States from donor eggs, according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. Use of donor eggs has grown nearly 40 percent since 2000.
One University of Southern California study of motherhood after menopause found that women over 50 could safely have babies using donor eggs. In 2000, there were 255 births to women 50 to 54, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over a 12-month period at the reproduction clinic in Bedford, 71.9 percent of patients using donor eggs gave birth. By comparison, 46 percent of women who underwent in vitro fertilization with their own eggs delivered.
The Nozells' marriage is the first for Paul and the second for Marianne. They considered adoption and tried other fertility treatments before attempting in vitro with donor eggs and Paul's sperm.
"We had already been through a lot of frustration, and a lot of money had been spent with every alternative I could think of," Marianne said. "By then I knew I wanted a donor."
They started by going through a database of donors, then thumbing through photos of smiling women willing to donate their eggs.
The Nozells weren't looking for a model-turned-med student with a 4.0 GPA. They wanted a petite woman, maybe with blond hair like Marianne's.
They also wanted a donor whose eggs had already successfully resulted in a pregnancy. But this knowledge was a double-edged sword. It raised the possibility that their children might run into children from the same woman's eggs - their biological half-siblings.
At some fertility clinics, couples pick their donor from a huge bank of women from around the country. While this widens the search and improves anonymity, it also adds travel expenses to the cost of egg retrieval.
Source: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/264/story/281912.html
Life Begins...
Miscarriage stories of loss, hope & help
http://born2luv.blogspot.com/
Stories of Pregnancy & Birth over 44y
- Daily blog of hope & inspiration!
http://pregnancyover44y.blogspot.com/
4,550 Stories of Pregnancy & Birth over 44y
Daily blog of hope & inspiration!
http://pregnancyover44y.blogspot.com/
Recent Keyword Searches: 45 year old woman wants to get pregnant with donor eggs, how to get pregnant in your forties, success with agnus castus and trying to conceive?, can 43 year old woman get pregnant with her own eggs?, can i still get pregnant if i am going through the menopause, is it safe to be pregnant at 43, can you get pregnant naturally at 45, when is it too late for a woman to get pregnant, in which that are the changes more in women to get pregnant, is it possible to get pregnant naturally aged forty
The number of "infants from a test tube" is growing year by year, and in highly developed countries it will soon make 1% to 3% of all new-borns. But how safe are the auxiliary reproductive technologies (ART)? Having summarized the data accumulated by the world science, specialists of the Research Institute of Medical Genetics (Tomsk Scientific Center, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences) tried to look into only one aspect of the ART safety risk of genomic imprinting diseases.
What kind of diseases are they? Normal mammal development requires that maternal and paternal gene sets differed functionally. In certain genes, only the maternal copy should work. And in others only the paternal copy should. The mechanism regulating functional differences of parental genomes is called genomic imprinting. This is a complicated and multi-step process, which starts in the parental gametal cells, where special enzymes mark and disconnect the required genes (a human being has about 70 of them), and continues after impregnation. Heavy pathologies can be caused by failure of such marking at some stage, and several genomic imprinting diseases are known with human beings.
Genomic imprinting reacts to external factors, and the researchers expected that the auxiliary reproductive technologies could influence it. The first example of such influence was discovered in experiments on animals' artificial impregnation. The "large posterity syndrome" sometimes develops with big horned cattle and sheep after embryo cultivation, the posterity weight often by twice exceeding the norm. Another important indication is increased fetus mortality in the course of pregnancy and in labour, at that the pregnancy is long and the delivery is difficult. The deceased fetus and new-borns have internal pathologies. The "large posterity syndrome" caused by derangements of genomic imprinting is very similar on the surface to the Wideman-Beckwith human syndrome arising for the same reason. In case of the Wideman-Beckwith syndrome, infants are born very big and with multiple pathologies. The syndrome frequency is normally one case per 12 to 15 thousand of new-borns, but it is several times higher with the children born with the help of the ART.
The researchers suggest several hypotheses explaining why genomic imprinting diseases occur more often in case of the ART than in case of traditional conception. Firstly, the process may be influenced by methodical peculiarities of artificial impregnation. In case of extracorporal fertilization, women are injected hormones to stimulate the ovulation. Possibly, gonadotropins accelerate maturation of ovums, which have not finished yet the genomic imprinting process. In some cases ovums have to be cultivated in nutrient medium prior to fertilization, and after fertilization embryos are bred on it before transplanting in the maternal organism. The nutrient medium composition and the lack of signals coming from the maternal organism in a normal case can also impact genomic imprinting, which takes place both in maturing ovums and in the developing embryo. It is not improbable that the genome marking can be influenced by cryopreservation of gametal cells and embryos, which is often practiced.
Secondly, the ART enables the events that would have never happen in a natural way. Thus, "anomalous" ovums can mature in case of hormone stimulation, such ovums would have scarcely mature during a natural cycle. Spermatozoa also can have imprinting defects. Normally, their fertility is low but they can be used for artificial impregnation, and then trouble is inevitable. Finally, artificial impregnation makes it possible that ill children are born with infertile married couples who have predisposition to genomic imprinting diseases.
Now, there is no unanimous opinion among the researchers as regards to the ART and genomic imprinting diseases. Some assume that the birth "the test-tube" children is an extremely rare event and it cannot be the reason for rejection of artificial impregnation. Their opponents believe that the genomic imprinting abnormalities cases known to us make only the visible part of the iceberg. We do not know too many things, and the risk of giving birth to infants with imprinting defects is although little, but important. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the problem and to make extracorporal fertilization safe in every respect.
Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/89741.php
What kind of diseases are they? Normal mammal development requires that maternal and paternal gene sets differed functionally. In certain genes, only the maternal copy should work. And in others only the paternal copy should. The mechanism regulating functional differences of parental genomes is called genomic imprinting. This is a complicated and multi-step process, which starts in the parental gametal cells, where special enzymes mark and disconnect the required genes (a human being has about 70 of them), and continues after impregnation. Heavy pathologies can be caused by failure of such marking at some stage, and several genomic imprinting diseases are known with human beings.
Genomic imprinting reacts to external factors, and the researchers expected that the auxiliary reproductive technologies could influence it. The first example of such influence was discovered in experiments on animals' artificial impregnation. The "large posterity syndrome" sometimes develops with big horned cattle and sheep after embryo cultivation, the posterity weight often by twice exceeding the norm. Another important indication is increased fetus mortality in the course of pregnancy and in labour, at that the pregnancy is long and the delivery is difficult. The deceased fetus and new-borns have internal pathologies. The "large posterity syndrome" caused by derangements of genomic imprinting is very similar on the surface to the Wideman-Beckwith human syndrome arising for the same reason. In case of the Wideman-Beckwith syndrome, infants are born very big and with multiple pathologies. The syndrome frequency is normally one case per 12 to 15 thousand of new-borns, but it is several times higher with the children born with the help of the ART.
The researchers suggest several hypotheses explaining why genomic imprinting diseases occur more often in case of the ART than in case of traditional conception. Firstly, the process may be influenced by methodical peculiarities of artificial impregnation. In case of extracorporal fertilization, women are injected hormones to stimulate the ovulation. Possibly, gonadotropins accelerate maturation of ovums, which have not finished yet the genomic imprinting process. In some cases ovums have to be cultivated in nutrient medium prior to fertilization, and after fertilization embryos are bred on it before transplanting in the maternal organism. The nutrient medium composition and the lack of signals coming from the maternal organism in a normal case can also impact genomic imprinting, which takes place both in maturing ovums and in the developing embryo. It is not improbable that the genome marking can be influenced by cryopreservation of gametal cells and embryos, which is often practiced.
Secondly, the ART enables the events that would have never happen in a natural way. Thus, "anomalous" ovums can mature in case of hormone stimulation, such ovums would have scarcely mature during a natural cycle. Spermatozoa also can have imprinting defects. Normally, their fertility is low but they can be used for artificial impregnation, and then trouble is inevitable. Finally, artificial impregnation makes it possible that ill children are born with infertile married couples who have predisposition to genomic imprinting diseases.
Now, there is no unanimous opinion among the researchers as regards to the ART and genomic imprinting diseases. Some assume that the birth "the test-tube" children is an extremely rare event and it cannot be the reason for rejection of artificial impregnation. Their opponents believe that the genomic imprinting abnormalities cases known to us make only the visible part of the iceberg. We do not know too many things, and the risk of giving birth to infants with imprinting defects is although little, but important. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the problem and to make extracorporal fertilization safe in every respect.
Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/89741.php
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