You know how the world at large is just ever so eager to remind us women that our reproductive organs have a shelf-life and to keep a close watch on that aul' biological clock?
Well, here is some good news for those who have put off parenthood for whatever reason, be it looking for Mr. Right or pursuing a dream career: It looks like the concept of ‘biological clocks’ might be about to go out of the window.
That's right. Because according to a new study by the University of Edinburgh, women might actually be able to produce
new eggs with the help of an unexpected medicine.
The discovery happened almost by accident when lead researcher,
Professor Evelyn Telfer, was trying to discover the impact of a chemotherapy drug called ABVD on fertility when she realised that women who had take the drug were producing a much more significant number of eggs than healthy women of a similar age.
Her conclusion? This drug made women
produce new eggs.
This is fairly groundbreaking as up until now, we have believed that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have, and as we age, our egg reserve decline and decline up until the age when we are all out of eggs, and officially reach menopause.
‘This was something remarkable and completely unexpected for us, the tissue appeared to have formed new eggs,’ Professor Telfer explains. ‘The dogma is that the human ovary has a fixed population of eggs and that no new eggs form throughout life.’ But not anymore…
And while the medical world is still a while off offering women ABVD for infertility, it does, according to the researcher, mean that further research is pending, and that maybe, in the future, we might have a new fertility treatment available for those struggling to conceive.
