The use of donor eggs is a highly requested and increasingly frequent technique, because the average age of the patients looking to become mothers is increasing. However, deciding to perform this type of treatment is very complicated for the patient in many cases, due to the doubts and uncertainties that it causes.
One of the main concerns of these patients is knowing how the donor is selected, whether tests are performed to determine their health status, and how the compatibility between the donor and the recipient is verified. In accordance with Law 14/2006 on Assisted Reproduction Techniques, which governs these treatments, donors must be in a state of good physical and mental health. For this purpose, standardised tests are carried out on donors for all diseases that may cause risks for the offspring. In addition, we will always look for the donor that has the closest physical resemblance (phenotypic) to the recipient: hair colour, eye colour, height, weight, and biometric features (at IFV, we use the most advanced technique in search of similarity, through artificial intelligence). That way, the ideal donor can be found.
Another frequent question in these treatments is whether the recipient will influence the development of the baby in any way, since genetically the egg carries information from the donor and not from the recipient. The answer to this question is yes. The mother of the baby, who carries the pregnancy, will determine the environment in which it will grow, influencing changes known as “epigenetics”, which allow the genes expressed in the baby to vary according to the environment in which they develop.
As for the health of babies born by this technique, there is also the possibility of analysing the genetics of the donor in even greater depth, at the decision of the patients, to minimise the risk of the baby inheriting some other recessive disease. This test, called “carrier screening” is performed on both gametes (in this case the donor and the provider of sperm), to confirm the genetic compatibility between them both.
