Kirsty Allsopp says for women 'fertility falls off a cliff'

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp has urged women to put off higher education and a career in favour of having children because their "fertility falls off a cliff". In a recent interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight, Ms Allsopp, who met her husband when she was 32 and then had two children, said: "Nature is not with you and I. Nature is not a feminist." She also encouraged women to be "more honest" with one another about their biological clock, saying the topic was still "taboo". So what is the truth about the female fertility window? Guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which was updated in 2013, is pretty encouraging. It says that "over 80% of couples in the general population will conceive within one year if the woman is aged under 40 years", if they have regular sexual intercourse and do not use contraception. NICE guidelines go on to state that "of those who do not conceive in the first year, about half will do so in the second year". That leaves around 10% of women - the percentage said to be affected by infertility in the UK. We know, of course, that female fertility declines with age, but is there really a dramatic drop-off at a certain point? No rule Mr Yacoub Khalaf, head of assisted reproduction at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London, says it is not quite as simple as that. "It is tempting to want a black and white answer, but biology doesn't work that way. "Some women find it difficult to conceive in their late 20s, while others don't have a problem into their 40s." So there is no rule, but science tells us that a woman's body does gradually change and there is nothing that can be done to alter that process. Mr Khalaf explains that from the age of 35, the rate of depletion of the follicles in the ovaries speeds up, and from the age of 40 they start to deplete even faster. These follicles are important because they house the eggs which will develop and mature before finally being released during ovulation. Hence, the quality and quantity of a women's eggs also begins declining sharply from around the age of 35 onwards. Read more ... Article: 7th June 2014 www.bbc.co.uk For more on testing your fertility visit www.prideangel.com/shop

New research suggests ovaries can produce unlimited eggs

New research, published online by the journal Nature Medicine, seems to overturn a widely-accepted biological principle governing female fertility, raising hopes for women who have trouble becoming pregnant.
For a half-century or so, women were presumed to be born with a supply of eggs that could not be replenished.

In fact, that was thought to be true of all mammals until 2004, when Massachusetts General Hospital researcher Jonathan L. Tilly, PhD, found that adult female mice could produce new eggs. And now, Tilly has extended his work to humans.

"We've isolated, essentially, the female equivalent of the stem cells that we know exist in men that actively make new sperm," said Tilly. "So having these cells now isolated, I think, opens up a lot of opportunities to consider that we simply couldn't fathom before."

Tilly and his colleagues took human ovaries and extracted the cells, by grabbing onto a particular protein on the surface, and doing laboratory tests to ensure they had the right cells.

"Once we had isolated these cells, we could place the cells in culture outside the body," he said. "And we could start with perhaps 100 cells, and over several months' time, take those 100 cells and make hundreds of thousands of cells. And interestingly, we noticed that these cells would spontaneously generate immature eggs, all on their own, in these cultures."

And to further confirm the ability of these stem cell-like cells to make eggs, the researchers placed some of the cells into human ovary tissue, which they then implanted under the skin of laboratory mice.

"And what we found when we did those types of studies, [is] these human cells, once reintroduced back into the environment we originally took them from, were more than happy to create brand new human egg cells," he explained.

Growing eggs in the lab could improve prospects for women undergoing in vitro fertilization, during which a woman's egg is fertilized in an external medium and then returned to her womb to develop.

But Tilly said his work could also lead to fertility treatments that might improve prospects for more traditional fertilization methods. "We can also think about, perhaps, targeting these cells in the ovaries with hormones that these cells like, and thereby increasing their activity and perhaps increasing the size of the egg cell reserve in the ovary, when it would be desirable to do so."

Tilly's work in the past with mice was greeted with skepticism, and independent experts are cautious about this study, too. As is often the case in science, the real proof may come when other researchers try to duplicate these findings.

Article: 28th February 2012 Voice of America www.voanews.com