A woman whose ovaries stopped working when she was a teenager has given birth to a girl after an ovary transplant from her identical twin sister, doctors in St. Louis said on Tuesday.
Three months after the operation, the 24-year-old woman began having normal menstrual cycles and became pregnant two months later, according to the medical team led by Dr. Sherman Silber of St. Luke’s Hospital.
The surgery came after two failed attempts at test tube fertilization using eggs donated by the woman's sister.
The successful outcome, Silber’s team said, may open the possibility for female cancer patients facing treatments that could make them sterile to freeze their ovary tissue and reimplant it later to make them once again fertile.
Details of the operation, scheduled to be published next month in the New England Journal of Medicine, were posted on the Journal’s web site at www.nejm.org
According to NEJM, this is the first case of transplantation of ovarian tissue from one person to another resulting in a birth.
