You can’t teach an old dog new tricks …oh, yes you can!
From Dr. Paul Gindoff of Chelsea Fertility New York City:
I finished my fellowship in the late 1980s around the time when in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment was just being introduced as a mainstream modality to treat female infertility. IVF treatment and management has changed significantly over the past twenty-five years.
At first, we started transferring embryos on day 2 or day 3 after egg retrieval, and these were always fresh transfers. Then, we developed freezing techniques, but embryo survival wasn’t refined enough to give desired results. Using a donor egg was the safety net for many hard-core cases and for recurrent pregnancy loss that could not be treated successfully.
Only with the establishment of a new freezing technique, vitrification, and advanced culturing of embryos to day 5 blastocyst, had the system really evolved to allow dramatic improvements in pregnancy rates and implantation for most patients.
This sounds like a watershed event, but the advancement with most impact has been PGS, pre-implantation genetic screening.
With trophoblast biopsy of blastocyst embryos and PGS, the filtering and selection process is so refined that only one vetted normal embryo will lead to a pregnancy in over 60% of cases on average at any age. This can now be combined with freeze-thaw embryo transfer to optimize the uterine receptivity and environment as “THE” state-of –“ART” treatment.
At Chelsea Fertility NYC, we have shifted to this latter modality in a huge way and it works beautifully.
