Scientific evidence suggests women’s ovaries can grow new eggs

A new study has found the first evidence that suggest the number of eggs a woman is born with, is not all they’ll ever have. The dogma is that the human ovary has a fixed population of eggs and that no new eggs form throughout life. Until now we believed that when the number of eggs a woman is born with run out, the woman can no longer have children. This is what we usually call “biological clock”.

Researchers studying a small group of cancer patients found that women taking a chemotherapy drug had a higher density of eggs than healthy women of the same age, suggesting that the drug could actually be encouraging their ovaries to grow new eggs.

If this very early evidence from a small study is confirmed, it would overturn our current understanding of reproductive biology, but we’re still a long way from fully understanding what’s going on.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-suggests-womens-ovaries-can-grow-new-eggs

Image credit: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-suggests-womens-ovaries-can-grow-new-eggs

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