Women who are not yet ready to start a family may choose to freeze their eggs to keep the option on the table for longer.

There has been significant promise, but also significant disappointment, with egg freezing to date. The disappointment stems from the relative lack of success rate data. Many more women are freezing eggs than thawing them. And until they are thawed, how do we know how successful the treatment really was?

At first, the data was generally only coming from egg donors, women pre-selected to have eggs that would be expected to succeed. Significantly less data was available for “social” egg freezing, that is, women who are choosing to delay their reproduction and hope to be able to freeze their eggs in time. The majority of our patients were waiting for the latter data sets to come through, as we tried to keep expectations firmly in check.

We are now finally seeing the numbers, and it appears that for most patients egg freezing works as well as embryo freezing, with success rates often in the range of 60% (see this article for more). This published data fit our internal data suggesting clinical pregnancy rates 55-60% per set of eggs for women under 38.

Egg freezing is promising when we have enough good eggs to freeze. If you are under 38 years old (age being a marker for egg quality) and have been told you should be able to freeze 12-20 mature eggs (ie. you have a good ovarian reserve), and are working with a good lab able to offer vitrification, you may anticipate having three or more fertilized egg develop to blastocysts and a reasonable expectation for pregnancy in the future. No, it isn’t perfect – all things being equal frozen eggs do not work as well as fresh eggs – but with good counselling egg freezing may provide some measure of reassurance that had been missing until now.

For a good video that walks you through the process check out this video, or a more detailed scientific review, see this article.

The post New data on non-donor egg freezing success rates! appeared first on Fertility.ca.

17-OHP and cortisol are circulating hormones found in all women. In general, any hormone that is found to be markedly outside of the normal range may have the potential to impact fertility, often by causing irregular menstrual cycles.

That’s why we often look at 17-OHP in women with irregular cycles.

Will the dexamethasone help you? Must you take it during pregnancy? Our generic advice when it comes to taking steroid supplements (like dexamethasone) is to proceed with caution and consider getting a second opinion.

For example, your doctor might be able to refer you to an “Antenatal Assessment Unit” where you could ask the obstetricians what they think of continuing to take dexamethasone once you’re pregnant.

It’s also important to know that dexamethasone therapy is not a routine practice across all fertility clinics.

The post How long do I have to take dexamethasone for, and what is 17-OHP? appeared first on Fertility.ca.

That said, while Betabase shows the broad range of normal, its numbers are also fallible: self-reporting can result in inaccuracies. Historically, this data has been collected by clinics, which keeps the numbers accurate and reliable…but the sample size quite small.

So which is better: traditional clinic data collection or self-reported online data collection? We don’t know, but our guess is neither is inherently better, just different. The information each individual patient is personally seeking will ultimately determine which data set is more valuable and enlightening, and until we know more about the differences or similarities between these data pools, it can’t hurt to look into both.

The post What’s Betabase.info and is it reliable? appeared first on Fertility.ca.