Dr. Lucky Sekhon

And so even on the male side, you know, that chronic sleep deprivation can lead to unhealthy behaviors and coping mechanisms that are going to feed back into other things that can really negatively impact fertility.

So egg freezing or embryo freezing, those are really the two ways that we know how to help people preserve their fertility.

So egg freezing is where you're just freezing eggs, which are a single cell, right?

And embryo freezing, you're taking those eggs out of the body and you're fertilizing them with sperm and then you're growing them out in the lab for about a week.

You can freeze them.

You can also remove a small number of cells from the outer part of the embryo that would one day become the placenta if that was an embryo that implanted.

And you can send that off for genetic testing.

So you could actually at that stage pick up those genetic reorganization errors that we were talking about, which is pretty wonderful and something that has transformed the success rates and allowed us to more confidently put back one embryo at a time without saying, oh, we're putting this patient at a higher risk of

not having a successful transfer, we're like, no, we're not really compromising on success rates and we're able to really choose the best embryo and we're able to lower their risk of miscarriage, which is really important, especially as women are going through these types of treatments in their 40s and beyond.

So there are really these two methods and the whole premise is

is around the fact that your uterus doesn't really age the same way your ovaries do.

And the amount of time that an egg or an embryo is frozen has no bearing on its reproductive potential.

So how long can that be frozen for?

Indefinitely.

Indefinitely.

There are some countries, I think they've changed the law in the last few years, but they had a limit in the UK that you could only store them for 10 years or not longer than 10 years.

here there isn't such a limit.

But you do have to ask yourself, you know, at what point is it maybe too high risk?

And that's, you know, an ethical debate in our field, you know, because we do have the ability now to kind of stop the clock, so to speak.

But I think there's a lot of confusion in the headlines when you hear about egg freezing because