A 32-year-old woman with five frozen eggs has a 55% chance of live birth. A 32-year-old woman with 25 frozen eggs has a 98% chance of live birth. A 38-year-old woman with five frozen eggs has a 26% chance of live birth. A 38-year-old woman with 25 frozen eggs has a 77% chance of live birth.
Women under 35 who freeze 10-20 eggs have a 70-90% chance of at least one live birth. If they undergo another cycle and increase the number of eggs frozen to 20, their chances jump to 90%
Only around one in three of those who choose to freeze their eggs will wind up having a child after going through the entire process, the study finds—and that success rate drops drastically for older women.
The number of eggs that can be stored depends on the age of the woman. In general 6 out of 8 eggs will survive the freezing and thawing process. Of these 6 eggs the chance of a live birth is somewhere between 32% and 18% depending on the age of the woman at the time she freezes her eggs.
With IVF, expect the process to take about six to eight weeks. This accounts for the pre-IVF hormonal preparation, egg stimulation, ovulation and egg retrieval, sperm selection, and the embryo transfer itself. With FET alone, the process can take three to four weeks.
Frozen Embryo Transfer Cons:
A disadvantage to frozen embryo transfers is the possibility embryos may not survive the freezing/thawing process. However, since frozen embryos have survival rates exceeding 95 percent, the risk is minimal.
When the procedure is performed above this age, the chances of successful livebirth are significantly reduced. Previous research and advice has recommended that women should freeze their eggs before the age of 35, with emphasis placed on the number of good eggs successfully frozen.
To give yourself the highest chances of success, we typically recommend freezing your eggs in your late 20s or early 30s. However, if you're diagnosed with an illness that may decrease the quality and quantity of your eggs, you might want to consider freezing your eggs even sooner.
For women who successfully freeze their eggs only to have them not work later on, it could be due to a variety of causes like the woman's age, the quality of her frozen eggs or how the eggs were frozen, experts say.
Short answer: no, egg freezing won't lower your ovarian reserve and won't decrease your chances of getting pregnancy naturally in the future.
Most fertility specialists believe that in more than 95% of IVF failures it is due to arrest of the embryos. Embryonic arrest is quite often due to chromosomal or other genetic abnormalities in those embryos that made them too “weak” to continue normal development and sustained implantation.
These also data suggest that babies born from frozen embryos have a significantly longer gestation period and are significantly heavier at birth compared to babies from fresh embryos.
And here's where things start to differ. With a fresh embryo transfer, a fertilized embryo will be implanted into the uterus within three to five days of the retrieval. With a frozen embryo transfer, embryos will be frozen, and implantation can be done weeks, months, or even years after retrieval and fertilization.
Studies show that women in their 20s and 30s have the most success when getting pregnant through IVF and other reproductive technologies. According to the CDC, the average percentages of assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles that lead to a live birth are: 31% in women younger than 35 years of age.
Technically, there is no time limit on egg freezing. Most clinics will try to work with the patient. However, some clinics prefer to stop egg freezing at particular ages, especially over 42. There will be too few quality eggs at this point.
On average IVF children are born a little earlier and have lower birth weights than naturally conceived children, which means more are considered to be 'Small for Gestational Age' (SGA).
Disadvantages of Freezing Eggs
There is always the chance of loss during the thawing process both with eggs and embryos. However, since eggs are a bit more fragile than embryos, you may lose more eggs than you anticipated when you decide to thaw them afterwards.
On average, they waited four years to thaw and fertilize their eggs. The overall chance of a live birth from the frozen eggs was 39 percent. But among women who were younger than 38 when they froze their eggs, the live birthrate was 51 percent. It rose to 70 percent if women younger than 38 also thawed 20 or more eggs.
The freezing process itself does not destroy nutrients. In meat and poultry products, there is little change in nutrient value during freezer storage.
Realistically, you can always undergo IVF unless you have experienced ovarian failure and/or menopause. However, pregnancy success rates using your own eggs drops considerably for women over 40.
Cost of egg freezing
At IVF Australia, an Elective Egg Freezing Cycle costs $6,000. This includes cycle management, surgeon's fee, initial freeze and first six months' storage (up to 10 eggs retrieved).
For example, if you are 37 years old, you should freeze at least 10 eggs in order to attain the highest chance of having a child. If you are 38 years old, you should aim to freeze 16 eggs to reach the same chance of having a baby.
Across all ages, women who thawed more than 20 mature eggs had a 58 percent live birth rate, which was profound and unexpected as this group included people past their reproductive prime. In fact, 14 patients who froze eggs at the age of 41 to 43 years successfully had children from their frozen eggs.
By 40, less than half of a woman's eggs are considered normal. Egg quality is largely determined by the ovarian environment that the eggs spend their final 90 days of development in; women in their 40s generally have a poor ovarian environment for producing high-quality eggs.
For example, a woman at 30 often has around 100,000-150,000 eggs in reserve. By 35, that number is likely around 80,000. Late into the thirties, that number could be 25,000, 10,000, or fewer.