The IVF Cycle

***VIDEO***

Welcome to our course on IVF or In Vitro Fertilisation. If you’ve been struggling to conceive for a number of years and been told that you need IVF treatment, it can be a difficult and a daunting time. There’s a lot of information to get to grips with really quickly as you come into starting a treatment cycle.

So we’ve designed this IVF course to try to help you understand the core components, that are broken down to explain the IVF treatment process. You can watch an individual lesson at a time or perhaps just look at the lessons that apply to you or watch the whole course from start to finish. But you should leave understanding IVF and feeling really comfortable as you move forwards into treatment and hopefully success.

If you watched our course on understanding fertility, you will remember there are some key components that have to work well to conceive naturally. Healthy eggs have to meet healthy sperm in the fallopian tube where fertilisation will take place. A fertilised egg will then move through the tube dividing into cells as it goes, and eventually implanting as a blastocyst in the womb and all of this under the influence of your natural hormones.

Now, if any one of these components is not working well, pregnancy just won’t happen. IVF treatment has been designed to help patients that struggle with any one of these steps during natural conception, whether it be an egg issue, a sperm issue, or perhaps blocked fallopian tubes.

IVF treatment can help you overcome those difficulties, and if any of those components are not working well, IVF can help you achieve success.

5 Key Steps of The IVF Cycle

IVF is one of the most successful of all fertility treatments, but it can be expensive and invasive with a number of steps involved to reach the point of an embryo transfer. I wanted to go through some of the main steps involved with IVF before we chat about each of those in more detail.

What you’re trying to do in an IVF cycle ultimately is to encourage follicles within the ovary to grow so that mature eggs can be harvested surgically.

Egg collection is a surgical procedure which involves piercing those small follicles on the ovaries to hopefully retain the mature eggs. The mature eggs then go into the laboratory where the laboratory will introduce them to the sperm so that they have a chance to fertilize.

Following normal fertilisation the eggs which are fertilized will continue to grow in culture, hopefully to the point of a blastocyst which is when the embryo would be transferred back into the womb.

So these five steps of follicle recruitment, egg collection, fertilization of eggs, laboratory culture, and embryo transfer are all crucial and part of an IVF cycle.