In vitro fertilization (IVF) may be the last resort for couples or singles wanting biological children. During IVF, a woman undergoes fertility treatments to produce more than one egg per cycle.
The doctor retrieves the eggs and then fertilizes them in a petri dish with a partner’s or donor’s sperm. They then transfer the resulting embryos into the woman’s uterus. With luck and care, she gives birth to a healthy baby nine months later.
Since the advent of IVF in 1978, millions of IVF babies have been born, and the procedure itself has evolved. So have other components of assisted reproductive technology (ART). You can now choose to add complementary procedures to IVF to give you and your baby the best chance possible for a healthy, uneventful birth.
At OC Fertility in Newport Beach, California, expert OB/GYNs Sharon Moayeri, MD, Nidhee Sachdev, MD, offer the latest ART and IVF techniques. Following are three complementary procedures you may choose to add on for your and your baby’s well-being.
To improve the odds of a healthy embryo, we may recommend a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). In traditional IVF, the eggs we extract from a woman’s ovaries are mixed in a petri dish with her partner’s or donor’s sperm. If all goes well, at least one egg fertilizes and forms an embryo.
However, there’s no way of knowing ahead of time if a sperm can fertilize an egg. With ICSI, however, we preselect healthy sperm.
We then inject a single healthy sperm cell into an egg. Although there’s no guarantee that an embryo will form, ICSI improves the odds. Once we have a healthy embryo, we then implant it into the woman’s uterus.
Perhaps no decision is more tortuous than to decide to terminate a pregnancy once your genetic tests come back positive for a serious or life-threatening condition. This may be even more traumatizing when the fetus tested was the result of IVF.
To eliminate the need for in-utero genetic screenings, we recommend preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) with comprehensive chromosome screening (CCS). PGS with CCS increases the odds of a healthy baby because embryos formed during IVF are more likely to have chromosomal abnormalities than those conceived naturally.
In addition, if you or your partner have a family history of medical conditions or chromosomal abnormalities, PGS with CCS gives you peace of mind. With CCS, we test all 24 chromosomes to be sure your embryo is as healthy as possible.
When you undergo IVF, your body produces multiple eggs during a single cycle. To increase your odds of a healthy embryo and a healthy baby, we fertilize all the healthy eggs we retrieve.
After PGS with CCS, we may discover you have multiple healthy embryos. You may then opt to freeze those embryos for future use.
The next time you want to have a baby, you don’t have to go through the entire IVF procedure again. Instead, we perform a frozen embryo transfer (FET) with embryos you have “banked.”
Beforehand, you take drugs that help increase the thickness of your uterine lining to give your embryo the best chance of implantation. You also take drugs to stop the production of eggs, which might interfere with embryo implantation.
We monitor your uterine lining and your cycle. When the time is right, we simply thaw an embryo and implant it in your uterus. You may take another medication to help the embryo stay implanted to grow into a fetus and, eventually, a baby.
Are you ready for IVF to create the family of your dreams? Schedule an appointment for IVF and complementary procedures by calling us today at 949-706-2229 or booking an appointment online.
