Science and Your Health

In a medical first, a 25-year-old Alabama woman gave birth last week, 15 months after receiving an ovarian tissue transplant from her identical twin sister. Stephanie Yarber had previously been unable to have children because she reached menopause prematurely at the age of 14, for unknown reasons.

While the news offered hope to other infertile women, the only successful surgeries so far have involved a transplanted tissue from an identical twin or from a patient's own ovarian tissue that had been removed and preserved while she underwent chemotherapy for cancer. Last September, researchers in Belgium reported the first birth of a child as a result of the latter procedure. Even then, since doctors had removed only one ovary from the patient, it was not clear whether her pregnancy came from the transplanted tissue or from the ovary that had remained in her body during cancer treatment.

Yarber's twin sister, Melanie Morgan, was fertile and the mother of three children. After trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant from eggs her twin had donated, the pair consulted with Dr. Sherman J. Silber at St. Luke's Hospital in St. Louis. He removed one of Morgan's ovaries and sewed a strip with eggs into Yarber's ovaries. About six months later, she became pregnant naturally. The procedure is described in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine published online last week.

Could ovarian transplants become more widespread? While doctors have now attempted other ovarian transplants between identical twin sisters, they are cautious about expanding the donor pool. Yarber did not need anti-rejection drugs since her twin was a perfect match genetically; but, in other cases, anti-rejection drugs may cause serious side effects.

The Anti-PMS Diet

A diet rich in calcium and vitamin D may lower the risk of developing premenstrual syndrome (PMS), according to a study published in the June 13 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.