CANCER VICTIM'S OVARY IS TRANSPLANTED INTO ARM.

Byline: LORRAINE FISHER

A CANCER sufferer has stayed fertile after doctors transplanted one of her ovaries into her arm.

The 29-year-old was diagnosed with cervical cancer and needed radiotherapy to cure her.

So Dutch surgeons removed her left ovary and reattached it to blood vessels in her left upper arm. The operation took five hours.

Doctors at Leiden University told the journal Cancer they believe the woman, from Surinam, South America, will be able to give birth by harvesting her eggs, fertilising them using IVF treatment and implanting them. They said the success of the treatment provides a new option for others.

They wrote: "It seems very likely that ovarian autotransplantation will be a realistic goal for women with cancer."

It is only the second time the technique has been performed.

In 1987 a French team successfully tried it on a woman with Hodgkins lymphoma but she has never attempted a pregnancy. In August Ouarda Touirat, 32, had a daughter in Belgium after ovarian tissue, removed and frozen before chemotherapy, was reimplanted.

But Dr James Catt, embryologist at St James' Hospital in Leeds, said yesterday: "Potentially this new technique could be better because you are not having to deep freeze the tissue and you are maintaining the blood supply."

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