For couples who have difficulty conceiving, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is often the last resort. The procedure is expensive, emotionally wrenching and often takes several rounds to succeed, if it does at all. Now, researchers say they have developed a way to better estimate the chances of having a baby through IVF a couple. The work is a step towards giving more choices with their limited resources patients, says reproductive endocrinologist Alan Penzias of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who was not affiliated with the study.
Many factors determine whether a couple will become pregnant, but the age of a woman is near the top of the list. At 21, when a woman is at the peak of fertility and 0% of eggs are normal, her chances of conceiving in any given cycle is 24%. It is 15% to 35% 10 to 40 years, and 2% to 42.
Given these long odds, many older women are turning to IVF. It is an expensive proposition. In addition to tag $ 10,000 or more price per cycle, a woman must be injected with hormones, consult a doctor more than once a week, and her eggs harvested and replanted. And even then the statistics are not in his favor. IVF is only successful about 45% of women in their mid-30s and only about 25% of women in their 40s.
When IVF patients ask about their chance of conceiving, doctors usually cite the success rate in their center for patients of a similar age group. But these are only averages approximate and do not reflect the specific situation of a patient, said IVF researcher Mylene Yao of Stanford School of Medicine of the University in Palo Alto, California. "Clinicians know that clinical factors besides age affect IVF results, but there is no way for them to quantify this," she said.
In an attempt to provide precise figures in IVF forecasts, Yao and colleagues collected data on more than 50 variables that influence the success of treatment. These included figures known before the start of IVF, such as age , the number of previous pregnancies, and the number of sperm, and the known digit after completion of the first IVF cycle, as if there were fertilization, endometrial thickness, and the average number of cells by embryo. in total, the researchers fed data on over 1,0 IVF procedures in the first round of the patients treated at Stanford Hospital and Clinics University.
When the researchers compared the model's predictive powers with a model based on age, they found that it was about 1000 times more accurate measure success in the second round of IVF. Because clinicians often use a variety of qualitative assessments to estimate the chances of success of IVF for a woman, there is no way to directly compare the accuracy of Yao model with the precision of a given clinician . But based on the accuracy of this first attempt, this type of statistical modeling may be a useful tool to help clinicians better predict the chances of success of IVF from a patient, the team announced today line in the Proceedings of the national Academy of sciences . Yao and a colleague co-founded a company to further develop the technology.
reproductive endocrinologist Alan Copperman of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York is encouraged by the results. He believes that the research may eventually help clinicians better estimate the number of embryos to transfer without increasing the likelihood of a woman carrying more than one fetus at a time. Penzias rents "intelligent method," the authors noted some limitations but with model: how clinicians manipulated embryos in the laboratory has not been quantified, for example. Still, he said, a robust way to predict the success of IVF would be a boon to couples, even though it offers some bad news. "If a couple has little or no chance of conceiving," said Penzias, "the sooner we can tell them this and the sooner they can mourn and move on."
0 Komentar