Many women we see have been told by their reproductive medicine consultants that they have ‘old eggs’. This seems to be a fairly standard conclusion once women have been through failed IVF, or for any woman over the age of 38. It’s an explanation that concerns me because it’s a simple conclusion to make based often on very little. We talk to the women we see instead about enhancing their ‘fertile environment’. We know that blood flow for instance, becomes more stagnant as we get older, and this can have an effect on the ripening or maturing of eggs in follicles. Acupuncture has a positive effect on blood flow and this is one of the key reasons we recommend women having fertility treatment receive acupuncture to support that procedure. We want to talk about quality and not quantity.
An interesting study has just been published, headed by Dr Wu, an embryologist in New York. She concludes from the research carried out on older women having IVF that it “is not the ageing eggs themselves that are responsible for lower success rates among older women, but the ageing of the eggs’ environment that is to blame”. The study suggests that what could happen in future is that eggs are collected at an earlier stage in IVF. Rather than aiming to get follicles which contain the eggs to the measurement of 19-21mm prior to egg collection, they could be collected when they measure just 16mm. Read more here.
Clinics such as CREATE, also take a different view and focus on blood flow and quality rather than quantity of eggs produced in IVF, favouring mild or natural IVF, in particular for older women.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ in IVF and we urge women and couples seeking treatment to find the best approach for them individually.