Wednesday 17 June 2015

Getting Pregnant or Winning the the Lotto... The Odds Are About the Same!


Let me start by saying I was very naive to IVF. Before Chris and I looked into it I thought that couples that did IVF were pretty much guaranteed to get pregnant and have a child. Imagine my shock when the success rates were not the 80% + that I was imagining, but were actually around 24% for women my age.

Now 24% doesn’t sound like very good odds, but if you compare it to the 5% chance per cycle I have now,  it starts to look a lot better.

In case you didn’t know here are the average stats for women actively trying to conceive per cycle by age group:

20s-            20-25%
30                 15%
35               <10%
40+                5%

It is really quite amazing that anyone gets pregnant at all. I remember reading a funny comment from another blogger (Sorry I can't remember who). She stated that it was nearly impossible for anyone to get pregnant unless of course they were a cheerleader having sex in the back seat of a car!

Here is the Calgary Regional Fertility Program’s IVF Success Rates for a fresh egg transfer:















And here are their rates for a frozen transfer:



















*Fresh transfer meaning having the eggs transferred during the same cycle. For frozen transfers the eggs are frozen, and then thawed to be implanted later. Frozen transfers often occur two months after the last IVF attempt or after a successful pregnancy.

When I looked at their success rates there was one thing that immediately jumped out at me . The rates for women my age in the frozen transfers section is significantly higher than those of the fresh transfer section. It goes from 25.5% to 42.8%! That is almost double the success rate!!!!

So I did a little online research and found this Wall Street Journal article:


Although they don’t know for sure why the rates are higher for the frozen transfers, they do have two different theories. One is that the different IVF medications are no longer in the woman’s body for the frozen transfer, and the other theory is that only the strongest embryos survive the freezing/thawing.

This is definitely something that I want to discuss further with Dr. F.!

p.s. If you are wondering about all the movie actresses that are getting pregnant past 43. It has been suggested that many of them are using donor eggs.



1 comment:

  1. Great post! I love your story! :)

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