Dr. Benito Martinez is a leading gynecologist specializing in Assisted Reproduction with more than 30 years of experience. Currently, he is the founder and medical director of the Assisted Reproduction Center of Marbella (CERAM), apart from being the founder of the Institute of Human Reproduction in Colombia and collaborating in the main Fertility Center in the same country.
What is the ovodonation technique and what does it consist of?
The technique of ovodonation is a technique that really by exact definition we do not have some definitions that are quite close to what the technique of ovodonation is. Ovodonation means that a person in an altruistic and disinterested way, a young person in good psychophysical health, wishes to donate her eggs, especially to a woman who needs them to be able to realize her desire for motherhood. This technique itself, that is, ovodonation, has been a technique that has been on the rise since its appearance in the 80’s and has really given magnificent results. To such an extent that in most hospitals and clinics where assisted reproduction is performed with ovodonation techniques, it is exactly 50%, or a little more than 50%, depending, of course, on many additional factors.
This technique is also a technique that helps us to facilitate the treatment, both for the recipient patient and for the donor patient. The recipient patient must be studied and prepared before undergoing this program. And it is especially mentioned because the recipient patients need to be studied because they are older than 40 years, the great majority of them. This means that many of them already have what we call age-related chronic diseases, which are often aggravated or aggravated by all the physiological changes that pregnancy produces. On the other hand, before undergoing a donation program, the donor patient must also be studied, both physically and psychologically, and also with analytical tests that guarantee that she does not have any transmissible genetic disease.
When should one opt for egg donation?
Ovodonation is indicated especially in couples who have undergone various types of treatments and have not achieved pregnancy, especially when the recipient patient is a patient over 40, 40, 42, 45 years old and, of course, their hormonal studies have shown that the possibility of recovering good quality oocytes are low. That is to say, what we call a low-responder patient. Also in patients who have what is called a premature ovulation failure. These patients also have problems producing good quality eggs, which makes this technique necessary. Or patients who have undergone treatment and have suffered repeated miscarriages or children with physical defects.
Which patients come to the clinic?
We have a wide range of patients coming to our office. Let me explain. They are patients, some of them, who have already been treated previously. Patients of different ages. They are young patients, patients of intermediate age, patients over 40 to 45 years old. Interestingly enough, the vast majority of our patients, all of them are over 40 years old. So the degree of difficulty is quite high for these patients. The egg donation program is in many cases the most widely accepted and, in order to be able to offer it, it is necessary to explain to the patient to the point of exhaustion what it consists of and how we could help her so that her fertilization failures can be fixed. In addition, we have different types of patients, not only by age, but also by pathologies; there are patients who have some pathology that needs to be studied and treated before offering them a treatment.
How are donors selected?
In order to accept a patient as a donor, it means that there is already a degree of motivation. This person who consults for donation already has in herself the desire to help another person. But not all donor patients can be considered suitable for donation. We have to interview them first, both the doctor and the psychologist. Then we have to do a physical examination to make sure that from a psychophysical point of view he is well. Then we also have to do an analysis, general analyses, hormone analyses, genetic analyses. And all this in order to be able to know if this patient is not going to transmit to us, above all, I insist, recessive diseases, that is to say, genetic diseases that could be harmful to the recipient patients.
What are the success rates in egg donation?
To talk about success rates is really very controversial, especially when we talk about success rates at the reproductive level. Because we do not know exactly if that number is going to correspond to reality, because the reality is that if I have patients with poor oocyte quality or poor semen quality, their success rate is not going to be exactly the same as a patient who has a good number of oocytes, a good number of spermatozoa. So the rate as such, the number as such, is a cold number and we have to explain to the couple how it goes step by step.
I mean, if the patient has good oocytes, I can tell her that she has a more or less good chance, if she has good spermatozoa and good oocytes, the chance may also be greater, especially if she has embryos. But then, when we have the embryos, we also have to know if those embryos are going to evolve well or if they are going to have some problem. Therefore, it is very difficult to speak of a rate as such. It is better to know step by step where they are at and what possibilities they have so that they do not suffer a psychological disorder.