Fertility Treatment Articles & Stories

The regular use of carefully chosen frozen embryos left over from fertility treatments dramatically increases the pregnancy success rate among infertile couples, a British clinic has found.
    
The new regimen holds the promise of sharply reducing the time a couple has to wait for a baby, and of alleviating the risk to women of repeated cycles of side-effect-ridden fertility drugs, which can lead to polycystic ovary syndrome.

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The research done at the Oxford Fertility Unit at The John Radcliffe Hospital in England continues to demonstrate the success of the advances that we have made in the last few years in fertility. The study discusses how freezing an embryo – a fertilized egg – and using it at a later time seems to increase the prospects for successful impregnation.  With these and other advances of In Vitro fertilization we now can offer assistance to many couples that previously could not achieve their dream of having a family.

While the latest research breakthroughs are interesting, it should not imply that one protocol is right for everyone. In our practice, at the Midwest Fertility Center, we believe that complete care of the patient should include a detailed evaluation of their fertility problems following which an individualized treatment plan can be designed. For example, besides In Vitro fertilization (IVF), the treatment could be hormonal assistance, surgical correction of tubal problems or Endometriosis.

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Giving a special hormone to infertile women can dramatically increase their production of sex hormones, which may lead to a new infertility treatment for women with low sex hormone levels, a recent study demonstrated.
    
The work, which was led by Waljit Dhillo of the Department of Investigative Medicine at Imperial College London, was presented at a meeting of the Society for Endocrinology BES.

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The gene that codes for susceptibility to obesity also predisposes a woman to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a common cause of infertility, a recent study discovered.
   
The study, done by Tom Barber and his colleagues from the Oxford Center for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, of the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, was presented at the annual Society for Endocrinology BES meeting in Britain.

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A protein vital for male fertility has been cloned, produced and purified, a recent study reported. The findings may open up new pathways in male fertility treatment and methods of male contraception.
   
The study, published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, recounted how researchers identified the binder of sperm protein (BSP), which is essential for sperm maturation, and then used genetic engineering techniques to produce it in significant quantities.

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Taking medications to enhance fertility appears to increase the chance of developing uterine cancer in particular, as well as some other forms of the disease, according to a very large, long, recently completed study. Drugs that stimulate ovulation have been used for more than three decades to help women who have difficulty conceiving, who are undergoing in vitro fertilization, or who are donating or selling their eggs. But the drugs’ effect on health has never been clarified.

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Having three or more miscarriages and undergoing hormone treatment for infertility increase pregnant women’s risk for pre-eclampsia, a condition of high blood pressure during pregnancy, a recent investigation shows.

In the study, which was published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health examined data on over 20,000 first-time mothers from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study. Their baseline for normalcy was the pre-eclampsia rate among first-time mothers who had never miscarried nor undergone fertility treatment, which was 5.2 percent.

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Obese men are three times more likely than normal-weight men to have low sperm counts and to have sperm that don't "swim upstream," a recent study showed.

"There is a strong relationship between overweight and obesity and altered sperm parameters," wrote Ahmad O. Hammoud and his colleagues at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. They published their work in the journal Fertility and Sterility. They say studies in the future should examine this relationship over time, and also study whether losing weight improves sperm quality. ( Read more about Sperm Quality Worsens With Obesity)

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Eating less and more healthily may be just the ticket for women to add years to their fertile lives - as well as boosting their sex drive and sexual satisfaction, which are part and parcel of fertility. This is true if a study done recently with mice can be extrapolated to humans. In the research, performed by a team led by Kaisa Selesniemi of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, adult female mice were fed less, and it was found that the aging process in their ovaries was slowed. This led to an extension of their fertility by a considerable number of months, which would translate into many years for women.

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Women who go to overseas fertility clinics run the risk of higher-than-average multiple pregnancies, which can dramatically increase the chances of high blood pressure, hospital stays, premature labor, fetal disabilities and even death in mother or babies. A study done on 109 British women with multiple pregnancies showed that 15 were conceived naturally and, of the 94 remaining, 25 percent had received fertility treatment outside of Britain - so-called fertility tourism.

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