Premature Ovarian Aging Video
Premature ovarian aging and premature menopause causes and treatments explained
Dr. Gleicher explains early and premature menopause, how it is linked to diminished ovarian reserve and the use of DHEA supplementation for improving ovarian reserve.
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Video transcript
Title: Premature Ovarian Aging
Speaker: Dr. Norbert Gleicher
What is the difference between premature ovarian aging and premature menopause?
"Many different things can cause early or premature menopause and indeed early or premature menopause is only the last ultimate step of early ovarian aging or premature ovarian aging as we have come to call it. Therefore one does not necessarily have to wait until this end stage of menopause. The vast majority of women who have this problem in association with infertility are fortunately enough in premature aging stages and it is very important to differentiate between those two conditions. Because while still prematurely aging but not yet in early menopause we can still help most women, once in menopause it becomes very difficult."
Women with premature ovarian aging have diminished ovarian reserve. Are there any effective treatments for diminished ovarian reserve?
"Many of our colleagues believe that diminished ovarian reserve is untreatable. Our center really does not believe that, hasn't believe in that for a good number of years, principally based on our experience with dhea. Our center was instrumental in bringing dhea into the infertility treatment, and today based on a recent survey approximately one third of all IVF centers around the world have started using dhea and I wouldn't be surprised if by now the number is even bigger."
"Through our dhea experience we have come to a new understanding of ovarian aging. One of the interesting observations that we have made in our dhea treated patients with very very severely diminished ovarian reserve is that not only are we getting a surprising number of pregnancies but once these women get pregnant our miscarriage rates are surprisingly low. Such low miscarriage rates could not be achieved if indeed the eggs these women were born with, aged and declined in quality. Because once an egg is of poor quality no dhea or no drug that I know about can reverse that kind of a process, it would seem irreversible. And as we recognize that we started thinking about what could really explain our observation of low miscarriage rates in these dhea treated patients. And then it came to us, that what likely is happening, is that the very immature egg, the egg in storage if I may call it that, the egg that has not yet been recruited into maturation, that's the egg a woman was born with. We think that egg, at this very immature stage, actually does not age, it is suspended in time. What is aging is the ovarian environment in which this egg, once it is recruited into maturation, goes through the maturation process because if this environment in an older women is lacking dhea and if dhea has an important function in this environment, then supplementing dhea can improve the environment and therefore an initially perfect immature egg allows a much healthier and much better maturation process."
- Premature Ovarian Aging (POA) is an early stage of premature menopause.
- At CHR, most women with POA get pregnant with their own eggs.
Dr. Gleicher is Founder and Medical Director of Center for Human Reproduction, located in New York City. He has over 30 years of experience in the field of reproductive endocrinology and infertility. As a physician dedicated to both clinical care and research, he has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers in some of the most important medical journals, as well as wrote and edited a number of textbooks that are now classics. He has served on many editorial boards, and is a frequently invited speaker at medical conferences all over the world.
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Last Updated: November 1, 2011
