23-year-old could become 1st woman to have baby with ovary removed & frozen when she was a child

Moaza Alanatrooshi, a 23-year-old Arabic woman, could make medical history by being the first woman to bear a child using her own ovary which was removed when she was a child and frozen. The ovaries were removed when she was eight when Alnatrooshi underwent treatment for beta thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder.

At the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, she underwent chemotherapy and then a bone marrow transplant. Chemotherapy damages the ovaries which were removed and frozen until 2015.

The ovary was unfrozen and shipped to Denmark where the ovary transplant was performed by Dr Sara Matthews, consultant gynaecologist at the Portland Hospital for women and children in London. To boost Alnatrooshi’s chances of pregnancy, she and husband Ahmed went through IVF, reports The Telegraph.

The doctors produced three embryos, one would be implanted in her real ovary in April.

In 2014, a 28-year-old woman went through a similar procedure, but her ovary were removed when she was 13 before chemotherapy. The woman gave birth in November 2014 to a baby boy. Her case slightly differs from Alnatrooshi whose ovary was removed when she was a child before she started to ovulate.

Matthews says that what Alnatrooshi went through is the only method for women who developed ailments as children and required treatment that could damage their ovaries. More than 90 percent of them cannot have their own children because they could not grow eggs and do IVF before puberty. “It is the only option for them and we have been able to prove that,” she adds.

If her ovaries were not re-transplanted, Alnatrooshi would reach menopause at age 21. However, the procedure reversed it and restored her hormones to normal. Since she is a Muslim from Dubai, Alnatrooshi considered an egg donation not an option allowed by the Islam religion.

“I want to believe I will be pregnant. I cannot wait for that day. I would like to say to all women that they have got to have hope,” Belfast Telegraph quotes Alnatrooshi.