Who does IVF help?

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How can IVF help?

So IVF is a great treatment that can overcome or combat many of the issues that prevent pregnancy from happening naturally. Whether you have problems with low ovarian reserve or poor quality eggs, IVF medication can hopefully boost the number of eggs that you produce in a cycle. Producing more eggs increases the chance of perhaps producing a normal egg.

If you’re not releasing your eggs normally in a condition we’ve already spoken about; polycystic ovaries, then IVF doesn’t rely on natural ovulation to occur and medication produces eggs ready for fertilisation. If a man has a problem with the sperm quality and it is not able to fertilise or reach the actual egg for fertilisation to take place in the fallopian tube, IVF allows the egg and the sperm to be brought together either naturally in a dish or through injection techniques called ICSI, where a directly a sperm is introduced into the cytoplasm, the jelly-like structure within the egg.

If patients have blocked fallopian tubes, sperm will never meet the eggs in the body. But in IVF, that process happens in the laboratory. So there are many reasons why IVF can help couples that are struggling to conceive naturally.

Where IVF doesn’t help

But IVF doesn’t solve all issues. If you have issues around implantation and recurrent miscarriage occurring, IVF does not bypass miscarriage. IVF is successful for many different reasons, but if there’s a problem with the womb itself affecting implantation, leading to multiple miscarriage, either due to fibroids or polyps or structural problems within the womb, then IVF does not always solve each of these problems.

It’s therefore really important to understand the difference between IVF being used for fertility problems, and miscarriage which can occur for many other much wider reasons. Sadly, some patients will have a combination of both fertility difficulties and also miscarriage problems, which makes it doubly difficult to actually conceive naturally.

And in those cases, IVF can at least give a boost and help create embryos and increase the potential for implantation to take place.