Take Part: Egg Donors Survey

By Christine Cupaiuolo — August 19, 2008

Research and follow-up of egg donors has been pretty non-existent — until now. The Donor Sibling Registry, which connects and supports donor families, is conducting a survey of egg donors for the purpose of qualitative research on the long-term health effects on women.

DSR founder Wendy Kramer explains:

We at the Donor Sibling Registry are doing a study of former egg donors. Some of you may have registered on the Donor Sibling Registry and some of you have not yet, or do not intend on making yourself available for contact from families that may have used your eggs. Either way, our goal is to get a better understanding of how egg donation affects women as time goes on, as we know of no medical studies or formal research on this topic. Based on the replies, we hope to write an article for a scientific journal.

Your answers will be kept anonymous, as I will only share the collective data, and no one’s personal information. This information could be extremely valuable in pushing the medical community to further investigate how egg donation physically affects woman who donate. The questions should only take a few minutes to answer.

Go here to take the survey. Responses can be emailed directly to wendy.kramer@yahoo.com.

4 responses to “Take Part: Egg Donors Survey”

  1. I firmly believe that hormones in high doses do cause cancer. I think a lot of women who grow through fertility treatments should also be very cautious. I just read the history of the pill and how in the beginning it was so high in hormones that many women were getting very sick. Women taking estrogen for menopause also had many issues until it was regulated better.

  2. Marcy Darnovsky over at the Center for Genetics and Society has written a great post about the survey that has links to articles on the known risks of egg donation and the problems generated by the for-profit nature of the fertility business.

  3. The post cited by Kiki has a link to a study that shows women like me who undergo infertility treatments do have a higher risk of estrogen related cancers, but not due to the treatments themselves, but because of the underlying causes of our infertility. Those of us who are infertile but decide not to undergo treatments to assist with pregnancy have the same higher risk as those of us who do.

    I wonder why there is no concern for women who are undergoing IVF as well. Many will undergo more stimulation and retrieval cycles than an egg donor will in her lifetime.

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