Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

Vidcast:  https://youtu.be/GV9b0yDqklU Banking tissue with sperm-producing cells may be an alternative for those boys and even older males too young or too sick to bank sperm prior to medical treatments that threaten their later fertility.  This conclusion comes from an 8 year study recently published in the journal Human Reproduction. As many as 2,000 boys and young men undergo sterilizing chemotherapy and radiation therapy for cancer eradication.  To preserve the possibility that they may later father children, a pilot study looked at the testicular tissue samples from 189 males undergoing such therapy.  Their ages ranged from 5 months to 34 years with an average of 8 years. Seventy-five percent of each tissue sample was cryopreserved for the patient’s later use.  The remainder was utilized for research into optimal methods for freezing, thawing, and potentially separating normal stem cells from tumor cells.   The study did demonstrate that sperm-generating cells may be successfully recovered from such tiss