Your eggs, sperms and uterus determine your IVF outcomes

MD/CEO Nordica Fertility CENTREINFO@ABAYOMIAJAYI. COM.NG,

When you visit the fer t i l - ity treatment centre to procure an IVF cycle and the experts there collect your eggs and sperms, combining them in a successful laboratory to develop embryos to put inside your uterus, explaining why the procedure could possibly not succeed is no easy task.

It is often difficult for you as a couple undergoing IVF to understand why the procedure may not succeed.

The rule of thumb, essentially, is that if you need IVF, you should start as early as possible because your success rate is better when you are younger. Being younger increases your chances, and you can freeze your eggs or embryos now when they are more viable for use later on in life. However, even this is no absolute guarantee.

The most important variables involved in a successful IVF cycle are a healthy egg, normal, functional sperm, and a uterus that is capable of nurturing the growth of a baby. There are many other factors that can impact your chance for pregnancy with IVF. Things like the laboratory environment, the techniques used in the lab, and the skill of the specialists performing the egg retrieval and embryo transfer.

Weight even plays a major role in fertility so you must be of the ideal body weight. Your Body Mass Index, BMI, should not exceed 30, otherwise, your success rate decreases. If your BMI is too high, it is a ready sign that your case would be problematic and there is no magic that the doctor can perform.

The same applies if you smoke, and have high caffeine and alcohol consumption. All these are not good for IVF outcomes.

We know that fertilisation is the coming together of the sperm and the egg and the success is determined by the quality of the resultant embryo. The embryo will need to implant into the endometrium or the lining of the uterus, so the two phases must be successful.

In IVF, which is fertilisation outside the body, when the lab is working well, there is about a 75 percent fertilisation rate, but most of the time, failure of IVF is from implantation and it has to do with the embryo and the endometrium which needs to be uniform in outline to encourage implantation.

So if you are above 35 and have done some surgeries, we want to be sure that your uterus is still regular as the structure of the endometrium should be, and to ensure that it functions to take up the embryo.

We want to ensure that there are good qualities, genetically normal embryos, not just embryos. If the egg and sperm are not genetically normal, there is a problem.

If you are having grade A embryos, what that only means is that the embryos are of good quality but may not be genetically normal, since the embryologist cannot know if the genes are normal by just looking

The embryos may look good, the embryologist cannot know if the embryos are genetically normal. Sometimes during the division of cells of the embryo, there are abnormal genes referred to as aneuploidy. This is the greatest problem for embryos to fail or for miscarriage to occur.

We always make it known that your outcomes for IVF are only as good as the eggs and sperm used. For one, the human egg is a very complex structure. As such, it is subject to damage that can render it nonfunctional.

As you age, the quality of your egg diminishes. Although abnormal sperm appear to be a less common factor affecting the success of an IVF cycle, they nevertheless play an important supporting role. The incidence of chromosomal abnormalities in sperm is far greater than that seen in eggs. A chromosomally abnormal egg may lead to a chromosomally abnormal pregnancy, chromosomally abnormal sperm may not be able to successfully fertilize an egg.

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was developed to enable men with very low sperm counts, low motility, or very few normal sperm to be able to achieve fertilization and pregnancy.

The embryos that are ultimately transferred into your uterus are based on the quality of eggs and sperms produced.

The surgical procedures, egg retrieval and the embryo transfer, are very important to the success of any IVF cycle. Retrieving fewer eggs than expected, or even worse – failing to retrieve any eggs, can lead to an adverse outcome.

Despite all of these challenges IVF remains extraordinarily successful. Even if you fail to conceive in the first two IVF cycles, your chance for success in the third cycle is still the same as it was in cycle one or two.

Counseling is important, and we are not talking of religious counseling, we are talking about counseling that is to listen to you and help you generate possible solutions.

While the IVF clinic cannot guarantee you outright success, it can guarantee you safety, sincerity, and confidentiality and can work with you to achieve success when you too play your own part and make the right decisions.

For instance, if you are a 45 year-old woman, you would not want to use your own eggs, because from clinical evidence, if you are using your eggs, your success rates are much lower with age.

When you are older you may need multiple cycles to increase the number of eggs and this may increase the number of genetically viable embryos.