Month: July 2012

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Why Birth Control Matters for the American Dream

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Unwed mothers are now more likely to slip down the economic ladder than ever before.

Melinda Gates was lauded for her bravery last week in stating her unequivocal support for contraception, especially for women in developing countries. She’s right, of course, that family planning saves lives, but it’s odd that a public embrace of contraception still makes headlines when more than 98% of American women have used contraception at some point in their lives. The problem, unfortunately, is that many Americans aren’t using contraception at the right point in their lives, and this oversight is especially common in the people who need it most: women who want a piece of the American Dream.

This is dangerous ground. No one wants to suggest that certain women shouldn’t have babies. But the hard truth is that certain women shouldn’t have babies if they aspire to a middle-class life.

To suggest that some women should delay (or forswear) having children harks back to the old “population bomb” anxiety of the 1960s, when the Town & Country set seemed to embrace procontraception policies in part to keep “riffraff” from solidifying their tenuous perch on the socioeconomic ladder. The history of contraception advocacy in the early 20th century carried a nasty stink of eugenics that continues to make a lot of people understandably uneasy. But that unease shouldn’t keep us from facing reality. Births to financially insecure single women who aspire to middle-class life are a hindrance to upward mobility.

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Three Men Want to Know How Their Frozen Sperm Was Destroyed

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Three men who claim their sperm was destroyed while it was being stored by Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation filed an emergency motion today to protect records and to inspect the hospitals’ cryopreservation system.

The men had their sperm frozen because they suffer from illnesses or were facing medical treatment that could make them infertile, lawyers for Corboy & Demetrio said today in a press release.
In one case, a 33-year-old suffered from leukemia and was told radical chemotherapy treatment would likely make him sterile. In a second case, a 26-year-old who suffers from an illness that could render him sterile preserved his sperm because he planned to one day become a husband and a father, according to the release.

The third man, 48, preserved his sperm because he also suffers from a condition that could make him sterile.

On April 21 and 22 — a Saturday and a Sunday — a cryogenic storage tank used for long-term storage of sperm samples malfunctioned and a round-the-clock alarm system attached to the unit failed to alert technicians, according to a press release from the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation. The press release said the information in it is attributable to Dr. Phillip Roemer, the chief medical officer of the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation.

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Schools failing to teach pupils about infertility

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Why doesn’t sex education cover infertility, when five children in every class are likely to experience it?

For a group of teenagers, Lauren, Fazana, Flora and Mackenzie are remarkably knowledgeable about fertility. Sitting in the library at St Marylebone school in central London, they’re explaining what they’ve learned. These year 10 girls know how common infertility is, how female fertility declines with age and they understand that IVF doesn’t always work. The discussion ranges from egg donation and surrogacy through to the dilemmas they know they may face later in life trying to balance careers with the desire for a family; “There’s never a time that’s exactly the right time to have a baby,” they explain.

It’s something every girl at St Marylebone will cover in their religious studies lessons, where the curriculum covers religious attitudes to family, relationships and family planning, as well as the ethics of fertility treatments. But in some other schools this highly topical issue barely gets a mention. IVF may be covered as a technological advance in science, but infertility isn’t part of the sex education curriculum, where the focus is on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. This may seem sensible when dealing with young people, but the reality is that pupils are far more likely to have a fertility problem in the future than they are to get pregnant while they’re still at school. The teenage pregnancy rates for England and Wales are the lowest they’ve been since the 1960s, but infertility rates are rising; one in six of the population will experience problems getting pregnant – that’s about five pupils in each class of 30.

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High Doses of Hormones Faulted in Fertility Care

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Two days after Debra Demidon underwent in vitro fertilization, she gained more than 30 pounds in fluid and suddenly was struggling to breathe.

Doctors diagnosed severe ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), a complication seen in some women who undergo fertility treatment. It landed Ms. Demidon in the hospital for five days; doctors ultimately drained 6.5 liters of fluid from her body. She missed three weeks of work, and by the time it was over, she and her husband had spent all of their savings.

“It was my first time doing IVF, and I’ll never do it again,” said Ms. Demidon, 28, a quality assurance specialist in Cayuga, N.Y. “It was awful. When you have that much fluid in you, it puts pressure on everything.”

OHSS is a little-known complication of fertility treatments that rely on high doses of hormones, which are standard in the United States and the United Kingdom; the syndrome is not the only health problem to be linked to in vitro fertilization. Fertility clinics in Europe and Japan have turned to a safer, low-dose form of IVF, but clinics here have largely resisted on the grounds that the success rates for low-dose IVF are not as high.

“Pregnancy rates are lower, and more cycles of IVF are necessary” with low-dose IVF, said Dr. Glenn L. Schattman, a fertility doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

But some critics are urging the industry to reconsider.

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Low Fat Diet May Ease Hot Flashes

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In addition to its other benefits, a low-fat diet may also reduce menopausal hot flashes and night sweats, new research has found.

Scientists studied 17,473 menopausal women who were not on hormone therapy. Forty percent were assigned to a low-fat dietary plan with increased intake of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. They met periodically with nutritionists to assure compliance. The rest ate their customary diets. All participants recorded night sweats and hot flashes with details about their severity.

Over all, women in the diet group were 14 percent more likely to eliminate these symptoms in the first year than those not on the diet, a difference that persisted after controlling for initial weight, smoking, ethnicity and other factors.

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UK Surgeons Launch Womb Transplant Charity

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A charity has been launched to raise money for research that could allow the first womb transplants in the UK.

Uterine Transplantation UK was set up by a team of British surgeons who say they need £500,000 to finish testing the procedure. Only after tests in animals have been completed will they be able to apply for ethics permission to perform the surgery in patients.

Womb transplantation offers an alternative to surrogacy or adoption for thousands of women who are either born without a womb or have theirs removed due to birthing complications, cancer or other diseases.

A previous attempt at this surgery in 2000 failed because of a problem in the blood supply to the transplanted uterus. However, several improvements to the technique have been made and last August a 21-year old woman in Turkey became the first successful recipient of a womb transplant.

‘We are confident, especially with a transplant abroad being carried out with the same methodology that we have recommended that within two years or so, given enough funding, we can begin helping women in the UK’, said Mr Richard Smith, a consultant gynaecologist from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and the Lister Hospital.

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Sperm Donor Records Disposed of in Japan

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TOKYO, July 14 (UPI) — A survey of Japanese fertility clinics found about 30 percent of information on sperm donors has been destroyed, officials said.

Under the Medical Practitioners Law, such clinics are required to keep donor records for five years, The Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

However, the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology advises fertility clinics keep records a longer period of time, as children conceived via artificial insemination by a donor, or AID, may try to find their biological fathers when they are older.

A survey conducted by the newspaper in June of 23 registered medical institutions found 12 clinics that provide AID said they keep all clinical records of the couples who have done the procedure, including information on the sperm donors. Six other institutions said they do not keep clinical records that contained information to identify donors. One clinic said it disposes of the records, but keeps other relevant documents. Four clinics surveyed said they did not do AID.

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Public Favors Posthumous Reproduction, with Consent

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(Reuters Health) – Many Americans may think it’s OK to retrieve sperm or eggs from a dead or dying spouse in order to have children in the future — but only if there is written consent, a new survey suggests.

The survey, of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, asked people about their views on “posthumous reproduction.”

Most often, that involves eggs, sperm or embryos that were frozen by a person before undergoing medical treatment that could cause infertility — usually chemotherapy or radiation for cancer. If that person dies, their surviving partner may use the eggs or sperm to have a child through assisted reproduction.

In those cases, couples would have typically planned for, and documented, what should be done with the sperm or eggs if the ill partner died.

But in recent years, it’s become possible to do “emergency” retrieval of sperm or eggs when someone suddenly dies or becomes terminally ill.

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