The largest U.S. report of elective fertility preservation outcomes to date found that 70 percent of women who froze eggs when they were younger than 38 — and thawed at least 20 eggs at a later date — had a baby.
Led by experts at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the NYU Langone Fertility Center, the new finding was based on 15 years of “real life” frozen egg thaw outcomes for women who had delayed childbearing and faced natural, age-related fertility decline.
Published online May 18 in Fertility and Sterility, the study also found that considerable number of the women studied had more than one child through egg preservation. In total the study reports 211 babies from egg freezing.
In comparison, and using fresh eggs or embryos from women trying to conceive, at age 40 fewer than 30 percent undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) become pregnant and fewer than 20 percent gave birth to live babies as a result, according to statistics gathered by the Centers for Disease and Prevention from the nation’s nearly 500 fertility clinics. Egg freezing and thawing at a later date provides a higher pregnancy success rate than using fresh embryos during assisted reproductive technology, say the study authors.
“Our findings shed light on the factors that track with successful births from egg freezing, which include careful screening of embryos to be thawed and implanted,” says study lead author Sarah Druckenmiller Cascante, MD, fellow in the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, within the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at NYU Langone. “A better understanding of the live birth rate from egg freezing for age-related fertility decline is necessary to inform patient decision-making.”
“Importantly, our study is based on actual clinical experience,” adds Cascante, “rather than mathematical modeling with limited data, which is most of what has been published on the chance of births from egg freezing thus far.” The number of U.S. women having children at older ages has been increasing for three decades, with evidence that the trend will continue. Birth rates have declined for women in their 20s and jumped for women in their late 30s and early 40s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The average age at first birth has risen from 19 years old in 1984 to 30 years old in 2021 and is higher in many metropolitan areas.
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