A 39-year old woman who had the world’s first whole ovary transplant gave birth to a healthy daughter in a private London hospital last week after undergoing pioneering new treatment developed in the US that allowed her to receive an ovary donated by her twin sister and then conceive naturally, according to a BBC News report.
Susanne Butscher and her husband Stephan, both German and living in the UK, have called their new baby Maja after the Roman goddess of fertility, symbolizing hope to millions of women whose infertility might be overcome with the same procedure that allowed Susanne and Stephan to conceive naturally.
In genetic terms Maja, who weighed 7lb 15oz (3.6kg) when she was born at Portland Hospital on Tuesday last week, is Susanne’s niece, since she carries the genes of her birth mother’s twin sister Dorothee who lives in Vancouver Island, Canada, where she runs a bed and breakfast business. Susanne asked her sister if she would be willing to donate an ovary three years ago.
Dorothee told the Telegraph newspaper she was “ecstatic” when she heard her sister was pregnant and she can’t wait to see Maja later this month when she flies over for a visit. Dorothee has two children and said it was a difficult decision to donate an ovary because it was a major procedure and not without risk. She said she felt a responsibility toward her children, the youngest of which, a boy, is two years old.
The transplant procedure was carried out by Dr Dr Sherman Silber, from the Infertility Centre of St Louis, Missouri, in the US. Last week Silber was at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine Conference in San Francisco, where he announced the birth of Maja.
Silber has carried out nine ovarian tissue transplants, all involving twin donor and recipients, but Susanne and Dorothee were the first successful whole ovary transplant which required microsurgery to connect the blood vessels to the ovary and then precise positioning so that eggs could travel down the fallopian tube unimpeded towards the uterus.
Writing in the Telegraph last week, Silber said he saw no reason why women who wished to delay motherhood could not have an ovary removed and then put back again later in life. He said it might sound odd but some of his cancer patients who have their ovaries frozen tell him they feel lucky they had cancer, because they were getting older and weren’t in a relationship yet and all their friends were worried about their biological clock. But they weren’t worried because they had a young frozen ovary.
Silber said he was not encouraging women to put off having children, but nowadays it seems that so many women aren’t ready to have children until their eggs are too old, and he thought those women should have the option to freeze their ovaries.
Another way a woman could postpone childbearing would be to freeze her eggs, wrote Silber but she would have to undergo up to four cycles of stimulation and that might cost 50,000 dollars, compared to between 9,000 and 13,000 dollars to freeze and reinsert an ovary, which also gives you 100,000 eggs.
According to the Telegraph, the main reason Susanne had the transplant was to stop the advance of osteoporosis which resulted from an early menopause. She discovered she was infertile 12 years ago and when she received Dorothee’s ovary she began to ovulate for the first time. Susanne told the paper that her baby was “a little miracle”.
Sources: Telegraph, BBC News.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD