A Danish woman became the first woman on Earth to give birth to a second child after an ovary transplant — and the second child happened naturally, without any fertility treatments at all.
According to a new article in the journal Human Reproduction, Stinne Holm Bergholdt had suffered from Ewing's sarcoma, a kind of bone cancer, in 2004, and doctors said chemotherapy would put her into early menopause. So she decided to freeze part of her right ovary and have 20 percent of the ovary reimplanted after the chemotherapy was completed. She took fertility treatments and had a daughter. But then in September 2008, she gave birth to a second child, without any fertility treatments at all, startling her doctors.
One of her doctors, Claus Yding Andersen, told the New York Daily News:
We were really surprised that she had done it herself. We did not expect the ovary transplant to still be working after four years.
Andersen tells BabyChums:
This showed that the original transplanted ovarian strips had continued to work for more than four years and that Mrs. Bergholdt still has the capacity to conceive and give birth to healthy children. It is an amazing fact that these ovarian strips have been working for so long, and it provides information on how powerful this technique can be. She continues to have natural menstrual cycles and, at present, is using pregnancy-preventing measures to avoid becoming pregnant again.
Wonder how long it'll be before someone manages to transplant ovarian tissue from one woman to another.