Fertility: S01 E12 – Ovum Donation – Dr. Whitten

Today we’re going to talk about ovum donation I’m Dr. Scott Whitten from the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine and I want to talk to you about ovum donation today because I don’t think a lot of patients or lay public understand what that means. Ovum is actually referring to egg so it’s also the process of egg donation and egg donation is used a lot more commonly than patients think. Egg donation is the process of using somebody else’s eggs in order to create your embryos to achieve your pregnancies and there’s different ways to obtain eggs to be used a many of the eggs come from altruistic women who are in their early twenties who contact our office or agencies and inquire about donating their eggs to couples that need eggs to create pregnancies and babies and when those egg donors present to an office they have to be thoroughly screen so not just anybody’s taken to be an egg donor. We want to ensure that they have good quality eggs or healthy they have good genetics too so all those things we test for prior to using an egg donor. But you can use egg donors that are fresh eggs from a donor in a fresh cycle meaning we would collect the eggs from them to create the embryos or we can actually obtain eggs from an egg bank so our center is part of a national eggbank called DEB USA or donor egg Bank USA where eggs are already collected and frozen from donors and they’re all over the country and were able to obtain those for our patients and help them to achieve pregnancies with them. There are also egg donors that come from agencies that will then visit our Center and we can collect the eggs for the intended parents. Eggs can also come from a family member if it that family members appropriate to donate eggs and has been psychologically screened and it’s comfortable with the process then we can use eggs from a known family member in order to create the pregnancy as well. Once the eggs are collected then the process of in vitro fertilization and creating the embryos and testing embryos is all taking place at that time so you might learn more from other informational videos that we have about in vitro fertilization for those steps. But egg donation is really an indicated type of treatment for certain types of patients. For example, women where they have run out of their eggs this is a natural process that occurs with women eventually in the end up in menopause but also women can experience premature loss of their eggs earlier on in life which is called premature ovarian failure or premature ovarian insufficiency. So if you run out of eggs you don’t have eggs or say you had chemotherapy and it destroyed your eggs or you had your ovaries removed because of pre cancerous or benign tumors or growths in the ovaries that would be the type of patient that would need eggs in order to achieve a pregnancy they have their uterus intact they have a source of sperm and all we need is those eggs and they can create the family that they’ve hope for egg donation unfortunately can be expensive for patients just because of the cost involved involving another party the expensive medications that are taken but certainly it’s a way to achieve their goal of parenthood for a lot of couples. The benefits of using egg to an egg donor is that those are usually the highest quality eggs that we can obtain part patients so they had the highest success rates and getting pregnant and typically very low miscarriage rates as well and low rates of chromosome abnormalities such as down syndrome. All of those are tremendous benefits for couples who need eggs and that is the role of ovum donation for our patients. If you guys would like to hear more about egg donation please contact our egg donor coordinator at our office at NCRM we’re happy to provide that information for you thank you.