Predicting IVF success
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Everyone who has gone through assisted reproductive therapy, particular in vitro fertilization (IVF), knows the uncertainty of the procedures. “Will it work this time?” is the question that in many cases gets a disappointing answer.
IVF clinics all over are proclaiming their high success rates to attract hopeful couples. In truth, predicting the likelihood for an IVF procedure to succeed is no easy task. For one thing, as many as 30 factors are involved. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology gives a US-wide estimate of 18 to 45% success rate.
In an IVF procedure, a woman gets drugs to stimulate ovulation. Her eggs are then removed and combined with sperms in a petri dish in a laboratory to produce embryos. In a typical IVF cycle, 5 to 12 embryos are produced but only embryos of the best quality are transferred to the uterus of the mother. Criteria used to check for quality include appearance, and the rate at which an embryo reaches the eight-cell stage.
Stanford University researchers did an analysis on clinical data from 665 IVF cycles performed at Stanford in 2005. Their goal is to identify a few factors that can strongly predict IVF success rate. Their results show that 4 main factors can best predict whether the cycle can succeed, namely:
- total number of embryos transferred
- total number of eight-cell embryos
- percentage of embryos that stopped dividing and would die
- the woman’s follicle-stimulating hormone level
These 4 factors could predict with up to 70% certainty whether the current IVF cycle would result in a pregnancy.
“IVF is very expensive - both financially and emotionally”, according to lead researcher Mylene Yao. She believes that couples who want to go through an IVF procedure will make their decisions based on probability. And they deserve more accurate prediction methods. Currently, a much bigger and comprehensive study is being conducted to confirm their results.
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