Scientifically speaking, frozen eggs do not have expiration dates. The technique used is called vitrification and it involves rapidly cooling down the eggs below 196 Celsius degrees, a temperature that all the biological activity including aging -stops and because it is done so fast is significantly reduce chance of forming ice crystals that damage the cells, so once frozen the biological age of this eggs do not change over time. Actually there have been numerous healthy babies born from eggs frozen for 10-15 years, so if a woman plans to freeze her eggs, she has to know that eggs have no expiration date and they can use it when they want.
There is not a limit on the storage time of the eggs. Thousands of healthy babies have been born from frozen eggs with longer storage than 14 years. Studies show no increase in birth defects or genetic defects with frozen eggs with long long storage.
Eggs can be frozen for many many years and kept in the storage for many many years. Literally The time freezes when we freeze the eggs so previously you could freeze the eggs for 10 years storage now it has been extended to 55 years.
The length of the time the eggs are kept in our tanks in the freezers doesn’t impact the quality of the eggs.
Drastically speaking eggs can be stored indefinitely for an infinite amount of years as long as the liquids that hold them are maintained. However there are certain rules and stipulations that certain governing bodies and some countries enforce on the amount of years you can have those eggs uh stored for. In the UK for example there’s a maximum of 55 years where those eggs can be kept in storage for you.
No, there is no safety issue or any negative impact of having your eggs frozen for a long period of time. We know now that it can be technically frozen many many years 20 -10 years, of course we’ll have to take into account on our more legal restrictions about getting pregnant and of course that the ideal time to get pregnant in terms of age in terms of surgical complications and getting a healthy pregnancy would be not anything above around 45-50. Besides that, you can get your eggs frozen when you are 25 and use them when you are 39 and that will not have a negative impact on them.
It hasn’t been shown that the time that the eggs are stored can be affecting the success rates, however you should be aware of the quality standards that your laboratory is following. They should be checking regularly the times where the eggs are stored.
“How long can the egg be frozen” is a very good question. We have to look back on embryo freezing data because egg freezing is very, very new. And the oldest egg freezing case resulted in babies about anywhere between two to five years. However, if we correlate that with when we freeze embryos, embryos were frozen indefinitely, most recently there was a case where women have the embryo frozen for over 20 years and have a healthy baby afterward. So, we use the same type of freezing technique for embryos that we do for eggs. So we can’t extrapolate that the egg can be frozen indefinitely and still have a good success rate when you go to thaw it out. So the data as far as long-term effects on birth defects, miscarriage rates is the same as if we’re using a fresh egg.
The eggs that we retrieve and freeze can be stored for a long time, over five years. There is a legal framework that allows us to freeze eggs for a period of even 20 years. This is very important for younger women with cancer who get their eggs frozen when they are 20 or 25 and decide to have their own family later. And the important issue is that through vitrification, we found out that there is no diminished egg quality after thawing. And we have a survival rate for the frozen and thawed eggs of over 90%. That means that egg freezing is a very safe procedure for the quality of eggs and can be performed without any precautions.
