It has been reported that a London hospital will give women with cancer the opportunity to freeze their ovaries on the NHS.
The Royal Free London confirmed that this incentive has the potential to help over 1,200 patients each year.
Patients who avail of this will remove and freeze one ovary which will then be re-transplanted when they want to start trying for kids.
Young girls with cancer like lymphoma and older women with hormone-sensitive breast cancer will be given a better chance at starting their own families because of this initiative.
Paul Hardiman told the Evening Standard: “There is an increasing need for techniques to help women who are diagnosed with cancer at a young age to help preserve their fertility.
“There are a number of ways to achieve that, but for certain groups of women and girls the conventional treatments are not available and ovarian tissue-freezing is the only option.
“This enables women who have gone through the trauma of having cancer and been cured to restore ‘normal’ lives and have children afterwards.”
Freezing the ovary gives women a better chance at conception.
The procedure helps prevent damage caused by both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Doctors follow keyhole techniques to remove the ovary and then divide it into strips of tissue and store it in the laboratory.
