When most people think about in vitro fertilization (IVF), they think of its use as a treatment for infertility. IVF can also be used to treat non-infertility conditions though. A growing space for the use of IVF is to use it as a treatment to reduce or eliminate inherited diseases from a family’s blood line.
Eliminating the risk of passing …
The world’s first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born in 1978 in the U.K. Since then, approximately 8 million babies have been born world-wide as a result of IVF. In the United States alone, approximately 1.5-2 percent of all babies born these days are conceived via IVF.
In the past 40 years, since the conception and …
A recent study published in the journal Fertility & Sterility gives us more information about the chance of having a healthy child after transferring a mosaic embryo. The study was able to show that mosaic embryos can result in the delivery of healthy babies and the extent of mosaicism may influence this chance.
The study looked at 77 women, who …
Here is the scanario. You get pregnant quickly the first time and have a healthy baby. Then you have many miscarriages before another successful pregnancy. That’s the scenario in an op-ed article in the New York Times, “We Were Ready to Give Up on a Second Baby Until a ‘Miracle’ Arrived“. In this article the couple just keeps …
Since physicians have been performing preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) biopsing several cells from a blastocyst and using more advanced genetic tests, Reproductive Endocrinologists been at a loss for how to deal with embryos with cells with more than one chromosomal arrangement, one normal and others with a variety of abnormal configurations. Mosaic embryos weren’t easily detectable until about …
There is an emerging ethical morass in the field of reproductive medicine: what to do when patients seeking to get pregnant select embryos with DNA that could lead to a disease or disability. Should clinicians’ desire to help their patients have children override concerns about possibly doing harm to those children? And what about cases in which patients end up …
Over the past 2 decades, preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) has fallen in and out of favor among fertility specialists. The benefits of performing PGS with in vitro fertilization have been hugely debated. While the techniques and technology for PGS have advanced during this time, it’s still unclear whether PGS provides a benefit and that should be determined for each individual …
One of the hardest questions to answer for a fertility specialist is, “Why did a genetically normal embryo fail to implant?”. With the increased use of preimplantation genetic screening on embryos, couples often have very high hopes of achieving a pregnancy when a genetically normal is obtained from an in vitro fertilization cycle. Unfortunately, not all genetically normal embryos will …
Although IVF has a high chance of success, not all couples conceive with their first IVF cycle. Patients who don’t conceive with IVF often ask, “What happened? Why weren’t we successful?” These can be difficult questions to answer, but after an unsuccessful cycle, it’s important for both the patients and the physician to review how the cycle went. For patients, …
Researchers in Brazil are developing a new software tool that may help physicians and embryologists choose the best embryos for transfer after an IVF cycle. The computer technology is supposed to recognize 24 characteristics of embryos, some of which are not detectable to embryologists using even the most sophisticated microscopes. These characteristics include the size of the embryo, the texture …
