Abstract:
Ovarian insufficiency is a major long-term adverse
event, following the administration of a myeloablative conditioning regimen,
and occurring in >80% of children and adolescents receiving such treatment
for malignant or non-malignant disease. Cryopreservation of ovarian tissue is
currently offered to preserve the fertility of these young patients. At least
35 live births have been reported after transplantation of cryopreserved
ovarian tissue in adult patients, but the procedure remains unproven for
ovarian tissue harvested at a prepubertal or pubertal age. We report here the
first live birth after autograft of cryopreserved ovarian tissue in a woman
with primary ovarian failure after a myeloablative conditioning regimen as part
of a hematopoietic stem cell transplantation performed for homozygous
sickle-cell anemia at age 14 years. This first report of successful fertility
restoration after the graft of ovarian tissue cryopreserved before menarche
offers reassuring evidence for the feasibility of the procedure when performed
during childhood.
See: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/woman-bears-child-ovarian-tissue-frozen-13/story?id=31665155
While doctors froze the girls’ ovarian tissue, they were not sure whether it would work or produce eggs when implanted as an adult because of the girl’s young age. Ten years after chemotherapy resulted in her remaining ovary failing, the woman had her frozen ovarian tissue grafted.
As a result, two years later, the woman was able to naturally conceive her child and deliver a baby in November, according to the journal.
"This is an important breakthrough in the field because children are the patients who are most likely to benefit from the procedure in the future,” she said in a statement. "When they are diagnosed with diseases that require treatment that can destroy ovarian function, freezing ovarian tissue is the only available option for preserving their fertility."
People of the Fore tribe, studied by scientists from Britain and PNG, have developed genetic resistance to a mad cow-like disease called kuru (a prion condition), which was spread mostly by the now abandoned ritual of eating relatives' brains at funerals.
ReplyDeleteExperts say the cannibalistic practice led to a major epidemic of kuru prion disease among the Fore people, which at its height in the late 1950s caused the death of up to 2 per cent of the population each year.
In findings published in the scientific journal Nature, the researchers said they had identified the specific prion resistance gene — and found that it also protects against all other forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
"This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia," said John Collinge of the Institute of Neurology's prion unit at University College London, which co-led the work.
See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-11/former-brain-eating-papua-tribe-offers-clues-on-prion-conditions/6538100
Asante EA, Smidak M, Grimshaw A, Houghton R, Tomlinson A, Jeelani A, Jakubcova T, Hamdan S, Richard-Londt A, Linehan JM, Brandner S, Alpers M, Whitfield J, Mead S, Wadsworth JD, Collinge J. A naturally occurring variant of the human prion protein completely prevents prion disease. Nature. 2015 Jun 10. doi:
10.1038/nature14510. [Epub ahead of print]