What is "oocyte" or "egg donation"?

What is "oocyte" or "egg donation"?

Richard Paulson (Chief, Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, USC) gives expert video advice on: What are some of the health risks of in vitro fertilization?; How do I get donor eggs for in vitro fertilization? and more...

Egg donation is a treatment which is offered to women who either do not have their own eggs or whose eggs are now not working well enough to produce embryos that are likely to implant. In this case, we use the term "oocyte donation" instead of "egg donation" because it's a fancier term, but, really, it means the same thing; oocyte is just "egg" in Latin. This therapy has been a tremendous help to us for women who are at the upper extreme of age in their mid-forties or late-forties, or even in some cases early ffities, who really would have had no other opportunity to become pregnant. Egg donation may also be applied to young women who have lost their ovaries either because of surgical intervention or because of cancer treatment, or perhaps because they have premature ovarian failure, for whom, ironically, egg donation was first designed. Nowdays, they represent a relatively smaller proportion of the population that is undergoing egg donation and the majority of women having egg donation are those who simply are now in their late forties or early fifties and need egg donation in order to become pregnant.