Miller, S. J., & Davis, J. B. (2014). Disclosure of experience with oocyte cryopreservation. The virtual mentor : VM, 16(10), 810-2. https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2014.16.10.stas1-1410
Miller SJ, Davis JB. Disclosure of experience with oocyte cryopreservation. The virtual mentor : VM. 2014;16(10):810-2. doi:10.1001/virtualmentor.2014.16.10.stas1-1410
Miller, Stephanie J., and Joseph B. Davis. "Disclosure of experience with oocyte cryopreservation." The virtual mentor : VM, vol. 16, no. 10, 2014, pp. 810-2.
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RRM Academy Synopsis
Authors Argue Egg-Freezing Clinics Need Not Disclose Experience
Egg-freezing clinics should not be required to tell patients their experience, argue the authors of this 2014 ethics opinion essay. They see no ethical duty to share it until experience is tied to better patient results. They name a tension between informed consent and gaining experience on patients.
Study at a glance, ethics opinion essay: Authors argue egg-freezing clinics need not disclose experience. Source: Miller SJ et al., 2014, PMID 25310048.
Key Findings
The authors "make the ethical case" that clinics "should not be required" to tell patients how much experience they have with egg freezing.
The authors say egg freezing has no nationally recognized training or certification beyond IVF training, which makes it "unclear how to measure experience," and "no data" show which measures improve outcomes.
Their opinion: clinics face "no ethical mandate to disclose experience" until measures of experience and validated training standards are linked to better outcomes for patients.
They set "completely informed patient consent" against "the gaining of experience" by using the new technology on patients.
They argue that if newer clinics and those outside academic health centers "disclosed less experience," they would find it "more difficult" to gain the experience they need.
The Authors' Position
“It is our opinion that there is no ethical mandate to disclose experience with egg freezing until measures of experience and validated training standards can be correlated with improved outcomes for patients.”
Quoted verbatim from this paper.
Interpretation
This 2014 ethics opinion essay reports no data of its own. The authors argue that no nationally recognized training program or certification in egg freezing exists beyond IVF training, so experience has no agreed measure. They say no data show which measures of experience improve patient outcomes. Separately, they say a clinic's experience does not change risk for "the maternal patient or the embryos". They cite academic-center data showing no increased risk of malformations in embryos from frozen eggs. They add that success data lag because many patients wait years to use frozen eggs.
RRM Context
The essay covers disclosure inside egg freezing, a service offered mainly by IVF centers. Informed consent is a core principle of restorative reproductive medicine, which looks for the cause of infertility and treats it. The authors weigh what a patient learns from a clinic's track record and conclude that experience figures would tell patients little today.
Our editorial summary of this paper, not the article's abstract.
