AssistedConception.org

Extreme exercise can stop a woman’s periods

Injections of a hormone made by fat cells can jump-start an idling reproductive system, research shows. Twice-daily injections of leptin restored menstruation in female athletes who had become so lean that their periods had stopped. The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center team said the injections might also prevent bone loss and treat the eating disorder anorexia nervosa.

Their findings are reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

(more…)

New fertility treatment ‘closer’

Fertility treatment has tended to rely on freezing embryos. The prospect of women routinely freezing unfertilised eggs for IVF has moved a step closer after research.
Thirteen children were born after 68 couples underwent treatment by Italian doctors who froze unfertilised eggs.

Egg freezing is not new but doctors have struggled to achieve live births and tend to rely on freezing embryos as eggs are more vulnerable. The team from Bologna’s Tecnobios Procreazione now wants to improve the number of eggs which survive freezing. The team froze 737 unfertilized eggs using the same method of slow freezing used during the cold storage of embryos but only 37% of the eggs survived the process of freezing and thawing as unfertilized eggs are vulnerable to ice formation.

(more…)