Egg Donor for IVF? Be Alert and Be Aware -- as in Beware!

"We don't know, of course, whether there is a likely connection between their egg donation and breast cancer. The only way to have a real answer is to begin keeping track of egg donors and to gather information on the long-term health risks of egg donation. Until then, potential egg donors need more realistic and clear explanations about the lack of knowledge about such risks."
"Egg donors are just not on anyone's radar. It's not the same as sperm donation, which doesn't involve hormone injections or any invasive treatments."
"In my opinion, egg donors need to be treated like all other organ donors -- their health should be monitored."
"All women who undergo ovarian stimulation, especially more than once, should be told that their long-term health risks are unknown."
Dr. Jennifer Schneider, Arizona Community physician

Left, Jessica Grace Wing, Right, mother Dr. Jennifer Schneider : Still from video

Several doctors at a London fertility clinic about 20 years ago wrote of the "tragic case of a young woman who died of cancer of the colon after successfully donating eggs to her younger sister". This was published in the journal Human Reproduction. Strangely enough, scientific medical curiosity has not been aroused to the extent where research dedicated to discovering how and why high levels of hormones administered to egg donors through IVF techniques has been a dormant issue. Not quite as though no one is interested because there could not possibly be any threat to the future health of such donors.

Perhaps it's because research funding is notoriously scarce. Perhaps it also owes greatly to the fact that funding often comes from pharmaceutical companies and since they're the producers of the chemical hormones used in the process they have no interest particularly in spending any of their profit to determine whether the technique and the material they provide hastens the deaths of young women. It would definitely produce bad press and depress sales of their product. And nor would clinics specializing in IVF feel inclined to push for research that might affect their bottom line.

So the anecdotal reports, troubling, but guesswork at best, although based on keen observation and the identification of cause-and-effect and related informed theories, is all that is available at the present time. And that's strange, since the technique involved in in-vitro fertilization and the hormones associated with it are so widely used, impacting on the lives of thousands of people, from donors to recipients, their families and the children born of IVF.

Donors are informed, if they ask, that no credible research exists that links IVF to any future health problems. Except that isn't the way it's relayed, instead, those questioning the safety of the technique are simply informed that there are no known issues; so rest assured and proceed. And that is precisely what Jessica Grace Wing experienced. A tall, attractive woman with an athletic build who was a student at Stanford University. She made multiple donations of her eggs as a way to help pay for her tuition. And her donations led to the birth of five healthy children to three families.

Her mother, a general physician, had asked her daughter if she was satisfied that egg donation was safe, to which the young woman responded she had been informed that it indeed is. Yet it appears that beyond the short-term effects of the hormone injections used to stimulate the release of multiple eggs at a time, there was really no research specifically examining the possible long-term effects on donors, so the issue, in fact, is a large, open vacuum.

At the age of 29, which was four years following her third egg donation, the young woman was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer and despite the state-of-the-art treatment she was given, her life ended at age 31, in 2003. Her mother, Dr. Schneider, entertained doubts in her grief whether the extensive hormone treatments her daughter had been exposed to, really had no risks attached, that the growth of the cancer her daughter developed might have been stimulated by the hormones involved in the treatments.

A look through the research results produced nothing since there hadn't been any research to give results. Egg donors may have been experiencing malign effects, but no one had ever bothered keeping track. So she herself conducted a study leading her to advocate for a registry whose results could be of use not only to egg donors but to women wishing to postpone pregnancy freezing their eggs for future use. It has been 14 years since the death of her daughter, fourteen years of neglect to initiate a registry.

Donors are not hard to find since fertility clinics and agencies devoted to finding egg donors advertise that $5,000 to $7,000 is available to anyone wishing to take part, to produce eggs for IVF. Those British doctors who wrote of a patient dying of cancer of the colon post-egg donation, had made note of the fact that long-term safety concerns had been raised in the British Medical Journal in 1989 amid concern over the high levels of hormones donors were administered, but evidently not enough interest was raised.

So Dr. Schneider and two co-authors reported in Reproductive Biomedicine Online on five cases among egg donors who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, four of whom were absent any genetic risk for the disease. None of the women, all in their 30s, had received information relating to long-term risks inherent in donation of their eggs, simply since there was no information to share with them, or with women supplying their own eggs for IVF undergoing similar hormonal treatment as egg donors.

Containers where harvested eggs are frozen and stored for in vitro fertilization. Credit Raymond McCrea Jones for The New York Times