When there are complex fertility problems such as endometriosis with obstruction of the fallopian tubes or severe decrease in sperm motility, more sophisticated assisted reproduction techniques are required. One of them is In Vitro Fertilization.
In Vitro Fertilization consists of extracting eggs from the ovary and taking them to the laboratory. There, under controlled conditions of temperature and humidity, they come into contact with the couple’s sperm for fertilization to occur. They are then left in an incubator for 72 hours until the first cell divisions occur. Once it has become an embryo with several cells, it is transferred to the uterus to continue its growth.
With In Vitro Fertilization, some of the natural barriers to fertilization are overcome, such as: the distance that sperm must travel throughout the woman’s reproductive system before they can reach the egg or the probability that the tube will not be able to catch the egg after ovulation. In fact, In Vitro Fertilization controls many parts of the fertilization process and is very efficient in achieving fertilization and obtaining embryos. However, when the embryo is put back into the uterus, this process is no longer controlled and the embryo may or may not implant. This causes the efficiency of In Vitro Fertilization to fall and the probability of a pregnancy to be 45% per attempt in women under 35 years of age.
The woman’s age is the most important predictor of success with In Vitro Fertilization. While it’s 45% or more in 35-year-old women, it’s only 27% in 40-year-old women and 9% in 42-year-old women. Why is this? Because of the physiological fact that a woman produces new eggs even before birth. After birth, not only are no new eggs produced, but they also begin to be used up rapidly (around 1,500 per month). The end result is that the older you are, the fewer eggs.
It is common for couples and doctors to underestimate the role of men in fertility treatments and that all attention is focused on the study and treatment of women. This is unfortunate because in about 40% of the time, the male factor is the most relevant.
The most frequent male problems: low sperm count or slow motility should be evaluated by the andrologist to try to determine the cause and try to obtain improvement. The most severe problems such as extremely low numbers (less than 1 million) or the total absence of sperm in the ejaculate (azoospermia) and large abnormalities in the sperm rarely get better and assisted reproduction techniques must therefore be used.
The Solution to the Severe Male Problem is Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, ICSI.
Naturally, a large number of sperm are required to reach the egg to break the barrier that surrounds it (zona pellucida) and fertilization is achieved. The discovery of ICSI in the 90s allowed a single sperm to fertilize the egg. This is done by using a micromanipulator that traps a sperm in a microscopic needle and introduces it directly into the egg during an In Vitro Fertilization cycle.
InSer Group
