Couples’ chances of becoming pregnant with various forms of fertility treatment may start to fall after two or three tries with the same tactic, a new study suggests.
The findings, reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility, may offer some guidance on a question under debate in the infertility treatment field: How many treatment cycles should a couple undergo before proceeding to another — often more intensive and expensive — form of treatment?
There are a number of options for treating fertility problems, depending on what the cause is, if that can be determined at all.
For women who have problems with ovulation, fertility drugs may be used to stimulate the ovaries to produce and release eggs. Another option is intrauterine insemination (IUI), where sperm are placed directly into the woman’s uterus via a catheter; the treatment, often used in conjunction with fertility drugs, may be used in cases where the man has certain fertility problems (like a low sperm count) or the cause of a couple’s infertility is unknown.
In-vitro fertilization, or IVF, is a higher-tech procedure where a woman’s eggs are fertilized in a lab dish, and the resulting embryos are implanted in her uterus several days later.
In the new study, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) looked at the rates of success with these three treatments among 408 couples seen at one of eight infertility centers.
Of the couples, 21 percent did not undergo any of the three treatments, though some had other procedures that are not considered “cycle-based,” such as surgery to remove uterine fibroids (benign growths in and around the walls of the uterus). The group’s rate of pregnancy over 18 months was 28 percent. source: www.reuters.com/news/health