WOMEN who suffer early menopause as a side-effect of life-saving medical treatment have been given fresh hope of starting a family by a second success for a new ovary transplant procedure.

Jacques Donnez, of the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, announced yesterday that the operation had restarted the menstrual cycle of an anaemic patient made infertile by her therapy.

She hopes to become pregnant.

The success dispels doubts about the potential of the technique, which have lingered since the birth last year of Tamara Touirat, the first baby born to a mother who had undergone the surgery. Some experts questioned whether Tamara’s mother, who was also treated by Professor Donnez, might have recovered her fertility spontaneously after cancer treatment triggered an early menopause.

His latest results, which were presented at the World Congress on Human Reproduction in Venice, indicate strongly that Tamara’s birth was no fluke and the operation was responsible, although another pregnancy is needed to confirm this.

The work suggests that “ovary banking” eventually could become a routine option for women with serious diseases, particularly some types of cancer, who need treatment that carries the risk of causing an early menopause.

Ovarian tissue would be removed before a woman starts therapy, frozen in liquid nitrogen, then thawed and retransplanted once she is healthy and ready to start a family. The technique could also be used, more controversially, by women in their twenties who wanted to delay motherhood. However, experts say that at present the risks are too great and the benefits too uncertain for it to be offered to any but a handful of women.

Professor Donnez’s latest patient is a 28-year-old Belgian woman who suffers from sickle-cell anaemia, which required radiotherapy to kill her bone marrow before a bone marrow transplant.

Slices of tissue were removed from one of her ovaries and frozen in 1999, before she had the therapy, which triggered a premature menopause in 2000. Last year some of the ovarian tissue was re-implanted next to an ovary and she began to menstruate normally in January.

“The transplant was carried out at the end of August, and now I am able to say that from January she started menstrual bleeding again,” Professor Donnez said.

Scientists attending the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) annual conference in London welcomed the news.

• The pledge by the Government to offer a free cycle of IVF to most infertile couples will not end the “postcode lottery” for treatment, doctors said. New rules on the provision of IVF will not guarantee access because they will be interpreted differently around the country, specialists told the HFEA conference.

  THE LONG PATH TO SUCCESS

  1940s: Freezing/thawing technique for ovarian tissue developed by Audrey Smith

  1993: Roger Gosden restarts the menstrual cycles of sheep and mice via ovarian tissue transplant

  1999: Team led by Gosden and Kutluk Oktay transplant ovarian tissue into a woman, briefly restoring her menstrual cycle

  2004: Oktay reports first human embryos from an ovarian transplant, but no pregnancy develops

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