RADICAL IVF THERAPY ‘HAS BETTER THAN 50-50 CHANCE’

First time ever that fertility treatment is more likely to succeed than fail, ‘excited’ doctors say

A RADICAL new approach to IVF is giving women more than a 50-50 chance of pregnancy for the first time, a new trial has found. Doctors in Britain have discovered that freezing all embryos and waiting at least a month before implanting them significantly boosts pregnancy rates.

Cambridge IVF clinic has become the first centre to routinely adopt the procedure during IVF treatment, after a trial found that allowing a woman’s body to recover resulted in pregnancy 62% of the time, compared with 41% when fresh embryos are implanted immediately after the first stage of fertility treatment.

Doctors say this means that, for the first time, couples can start fertility treatment knowing it is more likely to succeed than fail. Irish fertility

experts said they welcome all research on the subject, but remained cautious yesterday about the ‘freeze-all’ approach.

Women undergoing IVF usually have a fresh embryo transferred into the uterus within a week of the eggs being retrieved. But Cambridge IVF found waiting for the body to recover improved a woman’s chances of conceiving. The process, known as frozen embryo transfer (FET), was already being used in parts of the US and Scandinavia.

Consultant embryologist Stephen Harbottle, of Cambridge IVF, led the research, and said it was the most ‘exciting’ development he has witnessed in 25 years.

‘The biggest angst with fertility treatment is that it’s always been that the treatment

‘Not a one-size fits all approach’

is more likely to fail than be successful,’ he said.

‘What we’ve been doing for years is put the best embryo into the worst environment so by being very well-meaning, we might actually have been holding back success rates for years. We can start saying to people you’ve got a better than 50% chance of success in most of the age groups. Across the board, data is showing a huge increase in success rates. It’s really exciting.’

However, fertility experts in Ireland expressed some caution about the approach, while welcoming the findings.

Dr John Kennedy, medical director of the SIMS IVF clinic in Dublin, said that while freeze-all can be a ‘safer and more successful way of managing patients’, the decision should ideally be made by looking at the case for each individual woman.

He told the Irish Daily Mail the freezing and thawing process was not a popular method in the past as it usually resulted in the loss of a third of the eggs. However, thanks to new freezing technology, the loss of eggs when frozen and thawed has been reduced to 5-10%, leading to ‘more and more clinics’ starting to move more towards freeze-all.

Dr Kennedy said that at the SIMS clinic, around 30% of cases are freeze-all, compared to just 15-20% last year.

He said he was ‘still not 100% convinced you have to freeze all’, and added: ‘I think you can approach it on a case-bycase basis, but what you absolutely need to have is the ability to freeze and a good freezing and thawing system in place so that when it is the right thing to do you’re not compromising.’

However, other Irish fertility experts were apprehensive of the findings. A spokesman for Beacon CARE Fertility in Dublin said that there are mixed reports on the benefits to the freeze-all approach. ‘Other studies have been shown to have no difference,’ they said. ‘What is now clearer is that success will be dependent upon individual circumstances, and that the “freeze-all” approach is not “one size fits all”.

‘In other words, when a large number of women are treated, (145 in this study is classed as a relatively small group to assess due to the large differences in each case) and all the individual factors (known as “confounders”) are taken into account, then freeze-all is clearly beneficial for a subset of patients.

‘Therefore, the recommendation of a freeze-all approach needs to be evaluated carefully by the treating specialist for each individual case.’

And Dr John Waterstone – medical director of the Waterstone Clinic, which has branches in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford – said his clinic tends to only freeze embryos when a woman has produced a large number of eggs, or where there is a risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can be a lifethreatening side-effect of IVF.