Teenage Girls With Disease Still Have Functioning Follicles.(Turner syndrome)

2001 AUG 9 - (NewsRx Network) -- Swedish researchers have found that teenage girls with Turner syndrome still have follicles in their ovaries that may be capable of producing eggs.

This discovery offers hope that girls with Turner syndrome may be able to have babies in the future. Julius Hreinsson, an embryologist in the Fertility Unit at Huddinge University Hospital, in Stockholm, Sweden, told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting at Lausanne, Switzerland, July 4, 2001, that he and his colleagues had succeeded in obtaining ovarian tissue containing follicles from five teenage girls. The researchers had divided the tissue and then frozen it.

"To our knowledge this is the first time that follicles have been observed in ovarian tissue from patients with Turner's syndrome. Our findings give hope for the future infertility treatment of these girls," he told attendees of the meeting.

Turner syndrome affects about one in every 3,000 girls. The girls are born with one x chromosome missing and usually their ovaries do not develop properly. It is thought that the primordial follicles that are present in their ovaries at birth start to disappear rapidly, although it is not clear at what age this process starts. As a result, Turner syndrome women are usually infertile and spontaneous pregnancies occur in only about 2%-5% of them. However up to 30% do show some sexual development at puberty, which suggests that follicles are still in their ovaries as adolescents.

Hreinsson and his colleagues used laparoscopy to take ovarian tissue from six girls, ages 12, 13, 15, 15, 17, and 19, who had come to the clinic asking that their ovarian tissue should be frozen (cryopreserved) for possible infertility treatment in later life. They successfully retrieved ovarian-tissue-containing follicles from five of the girls, but the 17 ...