Belgian woman gives birth after infertility

New mother Ouarda Touirat, made infertile by chemotherapy due to cancer, gave birth to a baby girl thanks to a medical first ovarian tissue transplant.

“I was crying at first, it’s a dream…a big miracle,” said the 32-year old mother of baby Tamara, who was born at Brussels’ Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc hospital.

“I am very happy, it’s what I always wanted,” said a visibly happy Mrs Touirat, who presented her healthy 8.2 pound baby at a press conference at the hospital.

Doctors believe with the birth they have broken new ground in women’s health, in a procedure that could one day allow women to delay motherhood beyond the menopause.

“This is the first time that the tissue was cryo-preserved, removed before chemotherapy and was successfully implanted,” said Dr Jacques Donnez, head of the Department of Gynaecology and Andrology at the hospital, who led procedure.

“It is a big message of hope for all women with cancer who have to go and have chemotherapy.”

The birth drew big attention after the procedure was published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Dr Donnez said Mrs Touirat’s fertility was restored after doctors cut out and froze some of her ovarian tissue and transplanted it back into her body years later.

“When I proposed the ovarian graft to the patient we had no idea it was working or not, we just had experimental studies in animals,” he said.

He said a total of 146 women were undergoing the same procedure, “but Mrs Touirat was one of the first in 1997 who has undergone … the cryopreservation.”

Dr Donnez removed the ovarian tissue from Touirat before she underwent chemotherapy and radiation for Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1997.

Five years after Mrs Touirat, a former waitress, was cleared of cancer, the tissue was grafted back onto her fallopian tubes after she said she wanted to have a baby. Dr Donnez said she fell pregnant naturally.

The technique, described in the Lancet, involved cutting 12-15 millimetres long, 5 mm wide samples from the one of the two ovaries and freezing them in liquid nitrogen.

The tissue was later transplanted back into the body, allowing for a natural pregnancy.

“Several lines of evidence lend support to our assertion that the origin of the pregnancy was the autotransplanted … tissue,” the researchers wrote in the journal.

A top expert in the field were cautious however about the report, saying there was a small chance the baby came from existing ovaries rather than the transplanted tissue.

However, he said the doctors from Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium, made a strong case that the birth resulted from the transplant.

“It cannot be proved with 100% certainty (that the pregnancy came from the graft) because ovulation from the transplant was calculated from temperature but was not confirmed,” said Dr Kutluk Oktay, an expert who was not involved with the operation but has conducted much of the key research in the field.

Even though the woman’s remaining ovarian tissue stopped working after the cancer treatment, it recovered and she ovulated three years later, which indicates it’s possible that the native ovaries could have ovulated again to produce the baby, Dr Oktay said.

Dr Donnez was optimistic the procedure would be made easier in the years ahead thanks to advances, meaning more women could be given the choice of having a baby.

He said the treatment was not very expensive, adding it was “much less expensive than invitro fertilisation”.

He said health authorities should make it “a medical legal obligation” to offer women who have to undergo chemotherapy the option for fertility preservation.

“This is the way to go,” Dr Donnez said. “Because of the progress ... made by medicine, more and more women are survivors of cancer.”