Follicle numbers:
How is the ovarian follicle pool in women with with galactosemia, thalassemia, sickle cell disease and Turner Syndrome?
Author: Dr Debra Gook
These conditions are known to impact on the ovarian reserve in women but as to what extent has not been well documented. Ovarian cortex is now being frozen for girls and young women with these conditions by many groups to preserve follicular numbers before it is too late. But the numbers freezing tissue at any individual centre are likely to be low.
We would like to assess the number of follicles present in the ovarian tissue from the patients with the aim to determine follicle density with age, which could be helpful in predicting when to take tissue. These are fairly rare conditions and although we have been freezing tissue from paediatric and adult patients for many years we only have a couple of each of these that have frozen tissue. However, collectively from all those groups freezing ovarian tissue, we could have good numbers of each condition. Every patient will be important to add to our understanding of follicle dynamics in these conditions.
Study question: what is the number of follicles present in the ovarian tissue from patients with galactosemia, thalassemia, sickle cell disease and Turner Syndrome?
Invitation to contribute:
We would require for those who take a piece of ovarian cortex for pathology at time of freezing, to do a follicle count on the slide(s) prepared for pathology assessment. Patients need to have not had any chemotherapy before having tissue taken. We would need to know their age at time of freeze and disease, all data sent to us should be non-identifiable and will be reported as the group summary.
We will conduct a number of zoom meetings, at appropriate times for regions, starting from February 2025. These will inform everyone interested on how to collect the data, an example of a material transfer document if your institution requires, authorship etc.
If you are interested and would like to have your data included, please get in contact with debra.gook@thewomens.org.au.
Please join this initiative if you wish to have your data included, or have any question regarding the study!