There are situations in which a woman must postpone her search for pregnancy taking the risk of losing her fertility during that waiting time. An example of this is when a woman is diagnosed with cancer. From this moment on, he must undergo a series of treatments that may include chemotherapy or radiation. Both radiation and chemotherapy can destroy the egg reserve in a woman’s ovary and thus render her sterile. One solution to this problem is to remove your eggs and/or some ovarian tissue before therapy and keep them frozen for use after your entire process is over and the cancer is gone.
Before vitrification was discovered, the preservation of cells and tissues was through freezing and this technique had a great drawback: during the process, the water inside the cells (the egg has a large water content) formed ice crystals and these crystals could break the cell and destroy it. Until now, the technologies that had been developed to freeze eggs were very inefficient and very few eggs survived to be fertilized later.
A solution to this problem was vitrification, which consists of cooling the tissues so quickly (-130,000 degrees per minute) that they do not form ice crystals but a solid similar to glass. When the liquids are vitrified, they remain transparent, unlike freezing where the ice turned them white and opaque. Dr. M. Kuwayama assures that using this technique you can be successful in the survival of the eggs close to 100%. With these percentages, it is already practical for women who need to postpone their fertility to save their eggs to use them later and thus obtain their pregnancy.
