Is ovarian tissue freezing for cancer patients safe?

When women who would still like to have children discover they have cancer, they are often offered the option of freezing eggs or ovarian tissue for use in the future, in order to preserve their fertility which is often destroyed by the cancer treatment regimes.

Now, a team of Israeli researchers have raised questions as to whether this could lead to women being re-infected if the tissue isn't properly screened before it is returned to the woman's body. They suggest that very few fertility clinics have the expertise to screen ovarian tissue properly to ensure that this can't occur, and have concluded that proper testing is necessary before tissue is put back into the body if doctors want to eliminate that risk.

The Israeli research has been published in the journal Human Reproduction