To use your own eggs or not use your own eggs really is the question for women over a certain age facing challenges in becoming pregnant.
When the decision is to use in-vitro fertilization (IVF), the next question is whether a woman will use her own eggs or donor eggs. The answer and likelihood of getting pregnant are strongly related to age. Especially for women aged 38 and over, studies show a lower pregnancy success rate when women use their own eggs in treatment.
In positive news, the rate of pregnancy is not lower when older women use donor eggs. Studies show such success rates have remained consistent suggesting that the age and quality of the egg appears more important as a determinant of getting pregnant than the age of the patient who is pregnant.
The challenge for couples and fertility clinics has been determining the efficiency of using a patient’s own eggs according to a women’s age. Differences in patients undergoing IVF, treatment protocols and technologies used can make it especially difficult to predict live birth rates in women over the age 38 using IVF.
Recent research from Spain offers a real world experience to help predict the cumulative or eventual IVF rate of success in older patients. An analysis of all IVF treatments performed at Barcelona’s Dexeus clinic between 2000 and 2012 calculated cumulative live birth rates according to patient age and the number of eggs initially retrieved.
The study revealed cumulative live birth rates per patient declined significantly with increasing age (whether eggs were fresh or frozen) from 23.6% for 38-39 year old patients to 15.6% for those aged 40-41, to 6.6% for 42-43 year olds and finally, down to a live birth rate of 1.3% in women who were age 44 and older. In older patients the eventual pregnancy rate was highly dependent on the number of eggs retrieved after ovarian stimulation.
If age is a factor, your reproductive endocrinologist will help find the right treatment to help assure the odds of getting pregnant are in your favor.
