When it comes to fertility treatment of any kind, success rates are an important factor when choosing the right pathway for you.
If you're considering freezing your eggs, it's important to understand how likely your eggs are to survive the freeze-thaw process and the success rates for treatment using frozen eggs.
Here's everything you need to know about successful egg freezing is. If you'd like to discuss egg freezing in more detail, get in touch or book an appointment.
More people today are waiting to start a family, for important reasons from career to medical circumstances.
From the age of 35, the need for extra help from fertility treatment becomes more likely. But the success of even the most widely used treatments are limited by the quality and quantity of eggs.
For this reason, many are choosing to preserve their eggs. Egg freezing, known medically as ‘oocyte preservation’, involves retrieving and freezing eggs while they are at the best possible quality, earlier in life.
This keeps open the option of using your own, high-quality eggs should you need fertility treatment in the future. But, if you’re considering the process, you may wonder – what are the chances of it working?
Key factors that can influence the chances of successful treatment with your own frozen eggs include:
The age at which your eggs were frozen – with the highest success rates given by retrieval before age 35
The number of eggs retrieved
The freezing method, with modern flash vitrification techniques giving far higher success rates than slow-cooling
The number of eggs successfully thawed
The quality of the eggs, particularly the presence of chromosomal abnormalities in resulting embryos – which can be checked with PGT before implantation
Freezing eggs is a different process from freezing embryos, which is commonly part of IVF. For this reason, general IVF statistics don’t apply to fertility treatment using your own frozen eggs.
Generally, there is less data on the success rates of treatments using own frozen eggs.
Overall, the number of people having fertility treatments using their own frozen eggs is very small, as many have not yet returned to use their eggs so far. This is understandable, as the main reason for freezing your eggs is wanting to wait to start a family.
While there’s less success data for treatments with own egg freezing, it’s known that success rates tend to be somewhat lower than with using frozen donor eggs. This is likely because donor eggs are of the highest quality, due to strict criteria for donating.
Many people feel this is outweighed by the overwhelming positive that using their own frozen eggs means being able to have a genetic connection to their child.
To understand more about egg freezing success rates, we recommend reading the latest report from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK’s independent regulator of fertility treatment.
Between the decision to explore egg freezing, and having a child using your frozen eggs, there are many steps to go smoothly.
These include your fertility assessment, IVF to stimulate egg production, egg retrieval, freezing, thawing, and future fertility treatment.
It can be a great reassurance to choose fertility clinic like ours, knowing that we’re fertility experts with extensive experience in all these stages.
We’re specialists in all kinds of IVF, with more than 35 years of experience making families. Although egg freezing isn’t identical to IVF, it follows many of the same steps.
At our clinics, we run a comprehensive fertility assessment first, which helps our consultants advise you what outcomes you might expect if you freeze your eggs, and how many eggs you may need to freeze for a reasonable chance of success.
Percentage of eggs that survive thawing | TFP success rate (2023) Birth rate per thaw cycle |
---|---|
90% | 23% |