Oncofertility consortium consensus statement: guidelines for ovarian tissue cryopreservation.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) and storage of the resulting embryos is currently a proven method of fertility preservation for women who face an immediate threat to their future fertility. This method, however, is suitable for a fraction of patients and depends on a number of factors that may include her diagnosis, age, partner status, willingness to accept donor sperm, desire to freeze embryos, and ability to pay for these services. As fertility preservation techniques evolve, it is critical that physicians continue to evaluate practice guidelines in order to offer a wider menu of fertility preservation options tailored to each patient’s specific clinical scenario, to the risk-benefit ratio and takes into consideration the patient’s values. Practice guidelines and consensus statements for fertility preservation for oncology patients reflect the current evidence based and ethical practices in the related disciplines of oncology and reproductive endocrinology. Both the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) recently published guidelines to describe the circumstances under which fertility preservation should be discussed and to describe patients for which experimental methods, such as ovarian cryopreservation, may be suitable [1–3]. Taken together, these documents are comprehensive in their description of: