Boutique clinics who are taking on the IVF giants
QUEENSLAND boasts some of the most successful IVF clinics in the nation but performance rates vary and three times as many women get a baby at top performing clinics compared to poorer performers.
Analysis of success rates reported on the Federal Government’s Your IVF success website shows Care Fertility in Brisbane is the nation’s top performing clinic, delivering a baby to 72.2 per cent of women aged under 35.
Nationally Monash IVF Auchenflower with a score of 38.3 per cent was equal top for providing a baby to women aged 35-42.
However, both clinics treated only a small number of women and just a few more or less pregnancies each year could skew results.
Among younger women Care Fertility, Monash IVF clinics in Auchenflower, Rockhampton and the Gold Coast, Queensland Fertility Group clinics in Mackay, Gold Coast and Cairns, Cairns Fertility Centre and Fertility Solutions Bundaberg made the top ten performers in the state.
Among older women aged 35-42 Monash IVF Auchenflower and Rockhampton, Queensland Fertility Group clinics in Mackay, Cairns and the Gold Coast, Care fertility, Fertility
Solutions Bundaberg, City Fertility Brisbane and Adora fertility were among the top ten in the state.
“The proportion of patients over 40 is getting bigger every year and it’s an uphill struggle,” City Fertility specialist and head of fertility research at the University of New South Wales Professor Bill Ledger said.
“Those eggs have been there since before the woman was born, the idea that you can change their quality in the last few weeks before you collect them by giving medications of some sort is a struggle.”
News Corp revealed last year couples are now paying more than $15,000 for each IVF cycle.
At the best performing clinics more than one in three women aged 35-42 were successful at getting a live birth.
At the least successful clinics just one in eight older women went home with a baby.
Among clinics treating more than 300 women, Genea led the field nationally in treating women aged 35-42 and had four clinics in the top 10.
Genea’s medical director, Associate Professor Mark Bowman, said its high success rate was due to all its equipment being in-house and developed by its biotech arm.
“We’ve done lots of studies to show what gets you more embryos per egg collection, better quality embryos per collection, which means you’ve got more opportunities to succeed,” he said.
Once egg follicles reach the right size during IVF, women get a one-off injection and eggs must be harvested within 36 hours.
Many clinics only collect eggs Monday, Wednesday and Friday but Genea also collects Saturday.
“If you are forced as a doctor to do your egg collection on a Friday or put it off to a Monday, when perhaps ideally it could have been done on a Saturday then over time, measured over hundreds of cycles, we are going to find people who fall through the cracks,” he said.
The company also monitored embryo growth using time lapse photography instead of removing them from the incubator to be viewed under a microscope which also helped success rates, he said.
Monash IVF’S chief scientific officer Associate Professor Deirdre Zander-fox said the company was “rolling out the latest in incubators and using very high sensitivity equipment to monitor our temperature and gas concentrations and … we have had a significant improvement over the last four years of 5.3 per cent across the whole Monash IVF group.”