Is freezing eggs painful?

Egg freezing is the technology of freezing eggs. Why do we need to freeze eggs? There are many reasons. For example, as women age, the quality of their eggs will decline, and they hope to have children later. In this case, they can choose to freeze the eggs, store them first, and use them when needed. Because it involves freezing, many women worry about pain. So, is freezing eggs painful?

Freezing eggs is a relatively advanced scientific method that may not be painful, but it will always make women feel uncomfortable for a while.

Technical principle

Before women have their eggs retrieved, they need to take ovulation-stimulating drugs to allow multiple follicles to develop early, and use puncture technology to discharge multiple eggs, so that multiple eggs can be obtained at one time.

Frozen eggs are stored in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius for many years. No matter how many years it takes, as long as the technology is good and they are successfully thawed, they will be as active as fresh eggs, because all metabolism and molecular movement inside the eggs are stopped in the low-temperature liquid nitrogen environment. However, the international clinical practice is to freeze eggs for 5 years.

Egg freezing technology has indeed been gradually improving, initially with slow freezing and now with rapid freezing. Rapid freezing is also called vitrification freezing. This method can reduce the temperature of the protective liquid to minus 196℃ in a short period of time and make it glassy. This can better prevent the egg cells from being damaged by the formation of ice crystals during the freezing process. But despite this, compared with the more mature sperm freezing and embryo freezing technologies, egg freezing technology is still very immature and far from mature.

Relevant data shows that since the birth of the world's first slow-frozen egg baby in 1986, there have been only more than 200 children born through egg freezing technology in the world, and less than 20 in China. Wang Xingling, director of the Reproductive Medicine Center of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, told reporters that the egg freezing technology used by domestic hospitals is a medical measure based on certain diseases. It is mainly used to solve the problem of infertility and is a last resort. The egg freezing business for healthy women's long-term fertility is not widely available around the world.

The significance of freezing eggs and establishing an egg bank is to allow women who do not want to have children for the time being to preserve eggs that have strong fertilization ability when they were young and healthy, thereby preserving their fertility at their strongest period. However, if we want to provide women with comprehensive fertility insurance, simply freezing eggs is not enough, especially for patients with premature ovarian failure and young tumors. Experts point out that the most ideal way is to remove the ovarian tissue and freeze it before chemotherapy, and then transplant or culture the ovarian tissue in vitro after the condition has improved.

How to operate

To freeze eggs, you first need to freeze the eggs when the mother is healthy.

Prevent eggs from aging with the human body.

There are two ways to preserve eggs. The slow freezing method involves storing the eggs in a dehydrated solution, then slowly freezing them using a computer system, and finally sealing them in super-cold liquid nitrogen.

The other is vitrification, which involves placing the eggs in a highly concentrated osmotic fluid and then immediately storing them in liquid nitrogen. After the eggs are frozen and preserved, they can be taken out when you want to have a baby. After thawing, in vitro fertilization can be performed to finally obtain embryos.