For the first time a woman gave birth to baby after receiving an ovarian transplant. Stephanie Yarber, 25, received the transplant 15 months ago from her identical twin sister. Monday, Yarber, who is from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, gave birth to a healthy seven pound, 14 ounce baby girl. The child was delivered naturally.
This does not mean that the technology is now widely available for all women, however. The fact that Yarber is an identical twin means that her body would not reject the transplanted ovary and there was no need to use anti-rejection medication.
If there is not a perfect genetic match, anti-rejection drugs are required and they can have harmful side effects for the woman and the fetus. That raises ethical questions about the procedure since it is not a life saving one for the mother.
'One day, no doubt, the rejection problem will be overcome and we won't need the drugs, or we won't need them for long,' Doctor Roger G. Gosden, a member of the team that treated the sisters told the 'New York Times.' 'Then the procedure could be used very widely, and will replace a lot of conventional egg donation.'
An article describing the transplant surgery, which was performed at St. Luke's Hospital in St. Louis, will be published in the July 7 issue of 'The New England Journal of Medicine.'
Ms. Yarber could not get pregnant without the transplant. She reached menopause at age 14 for reasons unbeknownst to her doctors. Her ovaries were described as shrunken like those of a post-menopausal woman. Her twin sister, Melanie Morgan, was fertile, however.
First, Morgan donated eggs to her sister to attempt in vitro fertilization. Two attempts to implant a fetus in Ms. Yarber's uterus failed to result in pregnancies.
The transplant was performed and Yarber got pregnant naturally with no additional medical intervention.
Doctors also believe that Ms. Yarber could have subsequent pregnancies in a natural way as well.
The procedure holds out hope for cancer patients who have damaged ovaries due to chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The doctors have now tried the procedure on two other sets of identical twins. There is no timetable as to when the technology may exist to use this procedure on non-identical twins.
