Menopausal Woman Gets Ovary Implants : Health: The tissue, which was removed and frozen earlier, has apparently restored her fertility.

For the first time, doctors appear to have restored fertility in a menopausal woman by reimplanting into her abdomen several pieces of her ovaries that had been removed and frozen when she was younger.

The experimental procedure, performed on an American ballerina, could lead to greatly expanded reproductive options for women by allowing them to become pregnant years or decades later in life than is now possible, doctors said.

Now, only sperm can be frozen indefinitely, but eggs do not tolerate freezing well. Frozen embryos can survive for many years, but that approach requires a woman to choose the father of her future child in advance.

The ballerina, who is now 30 and went into early menopause after her ovaries were removed several years ago for medical reasons, has not tried to get pregnant yet, so it is too soon to say she is truly fertile. But all indications are that her reimplanted ovarian tissues are functioning well and can produce mature eggs on a monthly cycle, her doctors said.

“She actually ovulated and then she menstruated,” said Kutluk Oktay of the New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, who led the effort with Richard Gosden of the University of Leeds in England.

Their findings are scheduled to be presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Toronto but they were leaked Wednesday to newspapers in Britain, which touted the work Thursday in front-page headlines declaring the end of menopause.

Among the first to take advantage of the method will be young women undergoing treatment for cancer, Oktay said, which can poison the ovaries and render women infertile. Scores of such patients in the United States and England have already had parts of their ovaries frozen in hopes that re-implantation will someday be available and will work. Until now, however, the method had been proved wholly successful only in a single experiment performed on a sheep.

In the long run, doctors expect a much greater demand from healthy young or middle age women who want to save a clutch of youthful eggs in suspended animation until they are ready to become pregnant later in life.

“The demand for the medical applications like cancer is limited but important,” said Robert J. Stillman, medical director of the Shady Grove Fertility Reproductive Science Center in Rockville. “But the demand for [family] planning is immense.”

Ovarian tissue removal is a relatively simple surgical procedure, performed on an outpatient basis under general anesthesia. An instrument called a laparoscope is inserted through a small incision above the pubic area. The tissues must be frozen gradually in a specialized regimen still undergoing improvement but already available at several fertility centers.

Meanwhile, Oktay and others said, researchers are improving their ability to freeze human eggs for later use. Several researchers are scheduled to describe additional successful births from frozen eggs at next week’s meeting.

Medical experts and ethicists have expressed concern that the emergence of fertility-prolonging treatments such as these might lead to a new generation of children born to very old mothers who might not live to see their children make it to high school.

But, Stillman said, “many men getting vasectomies store sperm beforehand as a backup in case they change their mind, as they often do.”

“We have to be equally supportive of allowing women to do the same if the technologies have caught up.”