Health - A ray of hope

A new technique to freeze embryos should come as a ray of hope to couples unable to conceive naturally. This technique, Vitrification, first used successfully in Japan, ensures a better survival rate resulting in successful pregnancies.
In Vitrification , the embryos are mixed with a freezing media and suddenly plunged into liquid nitrogen. The super high concentration of anti-freeze and rapid drop in temperature does not allow the water inside the cell to turn into ice. Due to this sudden drop in temperature, the entire embryo is turned into a glassy state, avoiding the ice crystals which are known to damage embryo survival.Good news
This is good news for the patients as the woman does not have to repeatedly undergo removal of eggs. The normal pattern is to take out 10-15 eggs but put back only two or three. The rest of the developed eggs are stored by freezing. In conventional slow freezing, the temperature of the embryo goes down at precisely 0.3° C per minute. In vitrification, the temperature is dropped at 23,000° C per minute making it 70,000 times faster. At that speed of cooling and at that concentration of antifreeze, ice crystals simply cannot form. Earlier only about 5-6 eggs were used and the rest had to be destroyed. Now all can be preserved. Assisted reproductive technology has undergone significant advances and embryo freezing is a widely used routine procedure that may contribute to increasing cumulative pregnancy rates from every cycle of a successful oocyte recovery and transfer.
Often the lining of the womb is not ideal for pregnancy in the first fresh cycle. In that case we can freeze all the embryos and transfer them in the subsequent cycle when the lining is ideal for implantation. The better embryo survival rate increases the cumulative pregnancy rate.
The technique, however, demands higher technical skills at the clinics. In a recent national conference on gynaecology in Bhubaneshwar, Vitrification was discussed and the cases debated. The general consensus is that infertility specialists admit that Vitrification has allowed IVF practitioners better pregnancy rates than earlier as it allows implantation after reaching the state of blastocyst.