Oldest Baby Born From An Deep-Frozen Embryo
Category : Women Lifestyle, Women Health, Family
A Spanish woman has made medical history and broken a world record by having a healthy baby from an embryo frozen for 13 years. The child, is believed to be the world’s oldest in vitro child, could have been born in 1993 but its first experience of the world came 13 years later, or nine months after an embryo was pulled out of the minus 196C freezer cabinet at a Spanish fertility clinic. The child was born from one of six surplus embryos deepfrozen after a successful in vitro fertilisation programme involving another couple. They donated the embryo through an “embryo adoption” scheme to the unnamed woman, who has now given birth.
A spokesman for the Instituto Marques, Barcelona, said: “The child is perfectly healthy.” The baby’s sex and name have not been released.
The identity of the new parents and the sex, name and date of birth of the child have not been revealed. The adoptive mum, suffered several miscarriages during fertility treatment before turning to the institute’s embryo adoption programme as a last resort.
The original parents had donated the fertilised egg to the Instituto Marqués clinic after a sibling was born from a separate embryo successfully implanted in the mother’s womb.
Staff at Instituto Marquès, the Barcelona fertility clinic involved, are expected to offer more information next week. They believe that 13 years is the longest storage period from which a healthy baby has been delivered, and medical literature gives them some backing. It remains possible that embryos have been used after even longer, although no account has been reported, and the Spanish team seems to be on safe ground in claiming a record.
The previous record was held by an Israeli woman who gave birth to healthy twins from 12-year-old frozen embryos in May 2003. Actually nobody knows how long an embryo can be stored without losing viability, but the evidence suggests that it could be decades, or possibly centuries. It could, therefore, be possible, though it would be open to ethical questions, for the infertile daughter of the woman who provided the embryo to give birth to her brother or sister.
Britain puts a five-year limit on the preservation of frozen embryos and the law says the deadline can only be extended for a further five years with the written permission of parents.
But critics say the embryos could be used either for further attempts to conceive or donated to other women with fertility problems.
News of the birth is expected to give fresh ammunition on the scientific level to researchers in Britain who claim huge numbers of embryos are being needlessly destroyed every year because Britain lacks the equivalent of the embryo adoption scheme in Spain.
Studies suggests that there will be no ill-effects from lengthy embryo storage, though there may be limits. In one study, the success of IVF was compared in two groups of women: those whose embryos had been stored for between two and nine years, and those whose embryos had been stored for less then six months.
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