New IVF screening can turn
fertility clock back 10 years by only picking embryos most likely to develop
healthy
An IVF process that could give a
woman in her early forties the same chance of becoming pregnant as a
32-year-old has been developed by scientists. They say the screening treatment
could boost a 42-year-old’s odds of having a baby from 13 per cent to 60 per cent.
It works by picking only the embryos most likely to create a healthy foetus,
slashing the odds of miscarriage.
Crucially, it also involves the
embryos being frozen for at least a month after IVF to allow the woman’s
reproductive organs to return to normal. Scientists believe that the powerful
fertility-boosting drugs given during IVF can harm the embryo if it is put into
the womb too soon.
A woman aged 40 to 42 typically
has a low chance of becoming pregnant with IVF and is unlikely to conceive
naturally. But US researchers from Colorado will today tell the American
Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in San Diego, California, how they
have boosted success rates to 60 per cent. Patients will pay £2,000 for the
test, on top of a cycle of IVF costing £3,000 to £4,000 a course.
The process has already been
used on 1,200 women in the US. But although some British clinics have the
technology to offer it now, many are concerned about the effects of freezing
the embryo. Others believe women will be unwilling to pay the extra cost. The
US scientists claim their procedure is the most advanced of several being
developed to boost pregnancy odds, and is the only one to have been through
rigorous trials that have all shown the same high success rates. Called
comprehensive chromosome screening with vitrification, it involves taking a few
cells from a blastocyst – an embryo just five or six days old.
An ideal blastocyst has 46
chromosomes – 23 each from the sperm and the egg. The wrong chromosome count
reduces the odds of pregnancy – or ‘implantation’ – and raises the risk of
miscarriage. Only if the cells have 46 chromosomes is the embryo frozen. Some
women will not have good enough embryos and will never become pregnant no
matter how many times they have IVF. The scientists say the screening could
spare them the heartache of further costly treatments.
Dr Mandy Katz-Jaffe, from the
Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, said: ‘What we’ve been able to show
is that a woman aged 38 to 42, if she has a blastocyst with a normal number of
chromosomes, her chances of implantation are independent of her age. So she has
the same chances of implantation – at 60 per cent – as a woman who is 32.’
Oxford academic Dr Dagan Wells,
who helped develop the process, said freezing the embryo, known as
cryopreservation, not only boosted the chances of pregnancy but produced
healthier babies. He added: ‘The birth weight of the babies is essentially the
same as babies conceived naturally, whereas embryos produced by IVF and
transferred immediately, without cryopreservation, have a tendency to be of
lower weight.’ But Stuart Lavery, a consultant gynaecologist at the Hammersmith
Hospital in London and member of the British Fertility Society, said: ‘It’s
controversial. To put an embryo through the freeze and a thaw is a bit of an
insult. It’s a shock, and sometimes it will kill a few cells.’
Daily Mail UK
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This is a good research and it will help to decrease the birth defects in babies born through ivf treatment.
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