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.
One of our greatest challenges has been trying to improve overall IVF success rates in women over 38 without increasing the risk of multiple pregnancies including twins. The conventional approach has included transferring more embryos than in younger women. But inherent in that strategy is a increased risk of twins or more, creating riskier pregnancies. Now a new approach reported at ASRM in 2011 may help solve this problem.
In a retrospective study, women mean age 38.4 who had blast comprehensive chromosome screening (CCS) and frozen embryo transfer (FET) of a single normal blast had higher implantation and ongoing pregnancy rate (61%) than women having elective single embryo transfer (eSET) (fresh or frozen) without CCS. This may become the way to avoid twins in women over 35 while keeping IVF success high.