LONDON — A woman who had ovarian tissue removed and frozen during childhood has given birth to a baby after the tissue was transplanted successfully back into her, enabling her to get pregnant.
The woman, now 27, was only 13 when doctors stored some of her tissue because she was about to have a medical treatment that likely would leave her infertile. Doctors described her case as the first time tissue was removed from someone so young and ultimately led to the birth of a healthy baby.
Born in the Republic of Congo, the woman was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia, a serious blood disorder, when she was 5. She was not identified by the doctors. At age 11, she and her family moved to Belgium, and the girl was so sick her doctors gave her a bone marrow transplant from her brother.
Chemotherapy is sometimes used to help stimulate blood production in children with sickle cell anemia, but it risks damaging the ovaries. So the doctors removed part of her right ovary when she was 13 and froze several fragments. The girl hadn’t started menstruating but there were other signs she had begun puberty.
A decade later, doctors grafted four parts of the frozen ovarian tissue onto the young woman’s remaining ovary, and the transplanted tissue later began growing eggs. More than two years afterward, she became pregnant. In November, she gave birth to a nearly 7-pound boy.
“It was a very happy moment,” said Dr. Isabelle Demeestere, a gynecologist and fertility researcher at Erasmus Hospital in Brussels. “I was most happy for (my patient) because she was afraid if this didn’t work, there would be no other option for her to have a baby.” Demeestere and colleagues reported details of the case in a paper published online Wednesday in the journal Human Reproduction.
Women who had ovarian tissue removed and transplanted previously have given birth, but none were treated in childhood.
