Donor Eggs Break Down Conception Barrier

Nov. 12, 2002 — -- If you think 50 is too old for a woman to think about having a baby, new research says think again.

A study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association says healthy women should be able to give birth using donated eggs well into their 50s.

And the study says the chance of becoming pregnant this way is just as good at 55 years of age as it is at 35.

Marilyn Nolen and her husband had been trying to start a family ever since they got married. She went from one fertility treatment to another and by the time she was 50, nothing had worked.

"We tried adoptions and I was told we were too old," she explains.

Finally, at age 54, they tried one last attempt at pregnancy using egg donation: taking an egg from a younger woman, mixing it with her husband's sperm in a lab dish and implanting the resulting embryo in Marilyn's uterus.

Nolen gave birth to twin boys, Ryan and Travis, at age 55.

It has long been known that the older a woman gets, the harder it is for her to conceive. For a woman in her 40s, only one in 10 eggs are expected to develop into a baby.

"It's not that the egg ages at any accelerated rate, but [it is thought] the demands that are placed upon the egg are such that the older egg just cannot sustain it," explains Dr. Richard Paulson, chief of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The results of this most recent study of 77 women aged 50 to 63 found that using egg donation resulted in a birth rate of 37 percent. The average age of the donors was 27½ years old.

"Women at 50 can become pregnant with egg donation and they have the same probability of becoming pregnant as younger women," says Paulson, who is the lead author on the study. "The older uterus is able to respond and is able to adapt to the pregnancy and carry it to term."

However, these successful pregnancies do not come risk free for older women. Even among women in their 50s who had passed a rigorous physical, the study found a 20 percent risk of gestational or pregnancy induced diabetes and a 35 percent risk of preeclampsia or pregnancy related high blood pressure.