Egg Freezing

Ooctyle (Egg) freezing

Dr Knight and Demeter Fertility take great pride in helping to empower women to feel more in control of their bodies and lives with top line information on egg freezing and female fertility.

In our society we see that women are waiting longer to have children. Egg freezing is becoming more relevant as many women face the real challenge of having successful, healthy pregnancies later in life. While we have made great strides in other areas, our fertility is still limited by basic biology, the "biological clock" generally stops ticking in our late 30's or early 40's. Our opportunities may be endless, but our egg supply and egg quality are not, that is why more women are seeking egg freezing services.

Egg freezing offers women planning to have children after the age of 35 the opportunity to effectively slow down their biological clocks. Demeter Fertility's egg freezing services give women the unprecedented chance to store their eggs during their reproductive prime for use when they wish to start or expand their families

Egg Freezing Facts, and Breakthroughs

In the past, difficulty with egg freezing was due to an egg's tendency to develop ice crystals during the freezing process (which compromise the integrity of the egg), as well as hardening of the egg's outer membrane, making fertilisation difficult. Two recent breakthroughs have allowed scientists to overcome these egg freezing problems.

The first is the development of a new culture media system that protects the egg from damage during the freezing/thawing process. The media system prevents the formation of ice crystals during the egg freezing process. As we know from beer bottles in the freezer, ice expands and the bottle can break. The new culture media prevents this from happening.

The second breakthrough was the use of vitrification instead of slow freezing techniques. This process is so successful that nowadays egg freezing by means of vitrification is providing a highly effective tool, attaining similar outcomes to those obtained with fresh eggs, thus allowing its application into clinical practice.

The ability to postpone motherhood through egg freezing was made possible by the discovery that the age of a woman's eggs is more important than her biological age. In the last two decades, even postmenopausal women have become pregnant and delivered babies by using donor eggs from much younger women. Those developments created the incentive to preserve a woman's own eggs by egg freezing while the women are still young. Female fertility peaks around age 27 and by age 40, the chance of getting pregnant is less than 10%. Egg freezing enables women to break free from the stressful drumbeat of their biological clock.