Whilst I am not quite at the stage of using donor eggs, I am slowly making movements toward it as it is a fairly likely next move for me if frozen embryo fails.
That said I understand you can opt for a batch of frozen eggs or choose a fresh supply where your cycle is coincided with your donor's.
I am curious what are the advantages and disadvantages of each and people's reasons for choosing one over the other.
The waiting period for fresh donor eggs seems quite significant, is there a reason people opt for fresh instead of frozen when delays can be lengthy? I would like to increase my understanding and start working on my back up options.
Thank you so much for any input xx
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Skittles11
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I’ve done both and had a positive result with both. Unfortunately both ended up in miscarriage a bit later but I would say results seem the same (was in my case) in both. I suppose the only slight disadvantage with frozen is whether they survive the defrost. ( which I had recently which ended with nothing to transfer). Give me a shout if you want me to pm with more details on clinics etc. xx
Hi Kmcdon sorry for my delayed response. I'm very sorry to hear about your miscarriages. It's heartbreaking. I would appreciate it if you wouldn't mind messaging me with info on the clinics you've described above. Thanks so much x
If you purchase the frozen eggs from the egg bank (in the UK), they charge you per 6 eggs package or 6+4 (total 10 eggs) package. It is quite expensive in my opinion..The only advantage of it is you don't need to wait for a matching donor. Since the donor eggs are in the egg bank, they aren't keen on helping you to find (custom-made) the closer match donor. They want patients to choose what they have in the existing egg bank or advise you to wait/ keep an eye on the weekly updates to see if anyone better matches you. Another thing to concern is the frozen eggs survival rate through the freezing and thawing process.
For the fresh donor eggs, all eggs produced by the donor belong to you. If your donor produces 20+eggs, all yours. There are many guaranteed DE programs in Europe with cheaper treatment costs. The clinic I am going to use, they helped me to find a matching donor in just 2 days. She is perfectly matching all my requirements, I can't ask for more.
I will use PGT-A for all the embryos to increase the chances of success.
Hi Mary2022 thank you for replying to my post, sorry for the delay in responding but would you be able to private message me with more info regarding the clinic please? X
My decision was driven a bit by the clinic I wanted rather than the method, but from what I saw live birth rates was marginally higher with fresh rather than frozen, although tbh I think you can find every answer you want if you Google hard enough!
Our clinic guarantee a match with a donor within 12 weeks but obviously there may be a delay in the round. You don’t sync cycles - they do an egg and sperm collection on the same day and then freeze any embryos and then start prepping you for an FET. They seem to go for less eggs but hopefully higher quality although obvs difficult to guarantee that! Ping me if you want more info x
Like others mentioned when you choose frozen DE there is a risk of a number of them not surviving the thaw. You don't always need to synchronise your cycle with the donor's when you choose fresh DE. This is one of the ways. Any embryos can be frozen and transferred later.
The clinics abroad have much better DE packages offering a lot more for your money. They are more often fresh than frozen DE. The clinic I spoke to guarantees different numbers of blastocysts instead of eggs, depending on the package you get.
I don’t know if using donor eggs skews it but I don’t see why it would. There’s little chance and risk difference between using fresh vs frozen embryos in fact, frozen have a very slightly higher chance of working. Hope this helps
Yes, when it's an embryo it doesn't matter as you said. Embryos survive the thawing process better. Before fertilization though when it's just only an egg, there is a difference. They say that eggs are more sensitive than embryos and when thawing there is a chance that some eggs won't survive. With vitrification this has been improved but there is still a risk.
I was told that if frozen can survive being frozen and thawing they are already showing us they are strong. I have had 4 transfers and my two successful rounds were frozen. The 2 fresh didn't work. This was with my own eggs tgough, not DE. All the best of luck xx
we went with frozen donor eggs from a frozen donor egg bank in the UK. We wanted to to with this because the wait times for fresh in the uk were too long and uncertain and we didn’t want to go with an anonymous donor (in Spain, eg, they only have anonymous donors) because we felt that limited the choices of any future child.
The egg bank provided lots of information on the donors once you had registered (and didn’t operate a policy of only allowing you the “pen portrait” (which gives more details) of one donor at a time, which other egg banks operate). We sent them photos of us and they did facial recognition matching, so we knew that the donor we chose was an “excellent” match to my features and had the same eye colour as my partner. Previous matches we’d looked at, we got feedback like “their features would not look out of place in your family” and similar. We also asked about confirmation of proven fertility, which apparently can be a helpful indicator of potential success.
We chose 10 eggs because we were worried about the thawing process with 6 and thought it would be less expensive to have one cycle with 10 eggs than two with 6 if it didn’t work out. We ended up with 12, all survived the thaw, but we only had a 50% fertilisation rate. With my own eggs, we always had 90-100% fertilisation so I think this was an issue with the eggs post-thaw, ie related to using frozen eggs. The same thing happened to a couple of others that i know of, and it definitely wasn’t a sperm issue (based on the SA of the sample and month previous dna frag testing). We did, however wind up with 4 high quality embryos at the end of it, and I’m currently 12 wks pregnant with the first embryo transferred.
Good luck - it’s a difficult time for decision making, and i didn’t feel like there was that much frank advice available, especially when trying to choose a clinic.
Thanks, this was kind of where my thinking was at. I have been looking into it a little and I know that the thawing process can result in eggs being lost. However the other side of the coin is that the eggs are already there unlike the fresh eggs. I just wanted to check that there weren't any other pointers I'm missing but it looks like the main one is that fresh eggs survive better and success rate is higher but there can be delays whereas frozen eggs are more vulnerable but are immediately available. Something to consider. If I were going this route I would also opt for 10. Please can you message me where you went and how you feel they performed as a clinic? Patient support etc x
So we did donor eggs and after much research you get better results freezing embryos rather then eggs. That said, this option does have a longer waiting list in the UK so you have to weigh up the options. We went abroad and due to it being anonymous the waiting list is much shorter so if that isn't an issue then it's something to consider.xxx
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