Congolese Woman Makes Medical History By Having Fertility Restored, Gives Birth Using Frozen Ovary

Hope was made available to women whose reproductive organs may be damaged by chemotherapy and affect their chances of becoming pregnant. An unnamed Congolese woman had her ovarian tissue removed and frozen when she was diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia at 13.

The ailment needed the girl to undergo chemotherapy. Fortunately for her, she migrated to Belgium when she was 11 which gave her the chance to avail of modern science to address her health problems, reports the Irish Examiner. She was given bone marrow transplant from her brother which could severely damage her ovaries, reports NBC.

She had her right ovary removed and frozen. When she reached 21, she told her counsellors that she wanted to become a mother, so physicians started to study ways to restore her fertility. It started with Dr Isabelle Demeestre, a gynaecologist at Erasme Hospital in Belgium, stopping her hormone replacement therapy and thawing some of the patient’s frozen ovarian tissue.

Demeestre then grafted four fragments of the tissue on the patient’s remaining left ovary and another 11 fragments in other sites of her body. When the transplanted tissues began to respond to the hormones, the Congolese woman successfully grew follicles that had maturing eggs. Within five months, she started to menstruate.

After two years, when she turned 27, she became pregnant by her new boyfriend. In November 2014, she gave birth to baby boy a little less than 7 pounds. The report on the landmark event was published on Wednesday in the Human Reproduction journal.

Demeestre said that the case is an important breakthrough especially for women with ailments that require treatments that could destroy the ovary’s function. In such cases, the only option left for the patients is to freeze their ovarian tissue to preserve their fertility.

She pointed out that in the past, there were women who had their ovarian tissue removed and transplanted and eventually gave birth. However, this is the first time that the patient was treated in childhood.

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