This is one of a series of news items from abstracts of studies presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine as complied by Dr. David Meldrum, Scientific Director of Reproductive Partners. We appreciate the enormous amount of work it takes to compile and comment on these abstracts.
Being overweight, especially when one is obese, is a negative factor in IVF success. In a previous post I reported that a poster presentation at ASRM 2012 showed that using frozen transfers may be a way to mitigate the weight factor.
Another poster presentation at ASRM 2012 gives a hint of the reason for this phenomenon.
Early embryo morphokinetics using time-lapse images did not show an adverse effect of obesity on the cleavage time of the embryos in obese patients. This implies that obesity does not affect embryo quality.
So this finding could go along with a concept that reduced outcome in obese patients is an endometrial effect aggravated by the effect of ovarian stimulation, analogous to what occurs in endometriosis.
That would lead to the conclusion that all-freeze cycles with a frozen transfer in a future cycle might be the best course. Perhaps the actual best results might be achieved with substantial weight loss before starting the IVF cycle which could also result in a safer, easier and healthier pregnancy.