Clinical outcome of emergency egg vitrification for women when sperm extraction from the testicular tissues of the male partner is not successful

Abstract

The development of an effective oocyte cryopreservation system will have a significant impact on the clinical practice of reproductive medicine. However, the important option of emergency oocyte cryopreservation has yet to be well documented. In this report, we review the cases of 15 women with male partners who were diagnosed with nonobstructive azoospermia and for whom testicular sperm extraction on the day of oocyte retrieval failed. Emergency oocyte vitrification was performed and after two months, the vitrified oocytes were warmed and the surviving oocytes inseminated with frozen-thawed donor sperm by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). A total of 117 mature oocytes from the 15 women were vitrified and warmed. The post-warming survival rate was 84.6% (99/117), and the fertilization rate following ICSI was 83.8% (83/99). We selected 30 embryos for transfer to 15 patients, 8 of whom became pregnant. The clinical pregnancy rate was 53.3% (8/15) and the implantation rate was 30.0% (9/30). Nine healthy live births resulted from 8 pregnancies. These results indicate that emergency oocyte vitrification is an effective rescue technique that can be applied clinically with acceptable pregnancy and live birth rates when testicular sperm extraction from the male partner failed on the day of oocyte retrieval. These results also highlight another important option for oocyte cryopreservation through the use of vitrification technology.

Keywords:

• egg
• pregnancy
• sperm
• testicular tissue
• vitrification

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (No. J2006AA02Z4A4).

Declaration of Interest: The authors, W.Y. Song, Y.P. Sun, H.X. Jin, Z.M. Xin, and Y.C. Su, have no declarations of interest. R.C. Chian has interest in McGill Cryoleaf, Origio (MediCult) Company, Denmark.