How To Prepare For Your First Fertility Clinic Appointment?

The success rates of IVF are in the spotlight but there is a worry among patients. IVF cycles are extremely costly and so if things don’t work out at one go and women require more cycles for getting the desired success, then that means, you would need to spend a lot.

The problem lies with the fact that clinics are not bound to disclose the kind of success rates they have, so this makes it impossible for anyone to compare each and every clinic. So, how to make sure that you get down to a genuinely good IVF Clinic, where there is surety that going through an IVF cycle would not let your money go in waste. 

Now, we take into account certain key factors that influence the success of an IVF cycle along with some tips for asking the right kind of questions:

• Pregnancy against live birth rates: There is a steady decline not only in woman’s fertility but also in the success rates of IVF, as they grow older. In case of almost all clinics, the success rates tend to be on the higher side for those women, who are under the age of 30, with them having 26% chance that they are going to take home a baby after going through each cycle of IVF. On the other hand, those are aged above 40 years have just about 6% chance of getting success and take a baby home. Generally, figures suggest that only half of the pregnancies through IVF, for women above the age bracket of 40 years will lead to live birth. So, it is important to take note, if you see on the website of any clinic that they are showing pregnancy rate rather than live birth rate, most importantly if you are in your 40s. Prospective patients must ask their clinic to disclose the pregnancy rate as well as the live birth success rate for their respective age groups.
• Blastocyst cultures: Another way through which one can easily predict the success of any particular clinic is by seeing whether they use blastocyst culture. The normal tradition was to grow embryos just for a few days till the stage of cleavage but now, the main aim of most treatment is to the growth of embryos for five days till they reach the stage of a blastocyst.
• This is a kind of a situation wherein the best survive till the end and the weaker ones tend to die down. This process of selection makes it easier for embryologists to take the best embryo for transfer, hence leading to better results.
• Sperm injections: Success through IVF is also dependent upon the cause behind infertility. Some male counterparts have really low sperm count and hence require intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection. This leads to injection of an individual sperm into an egg. At times when things are not clear whether a patient would need ICSI, doctor will generally allow half of the eggs to get inseminated through the standard process of insemination and the other half would be injected through ICSI. If someone gets enough eggs, then it would surely require to enquire.