Why sextuplets are not a good idea...

If you've thought about travelling abroad for fertility treatment and have maybe wondered whether the relaxed regulations in other countries might be part of the attraction, think again... I've just been reading an article about a woman in the States who has given birth to sextuplets after fertility treatment - ten weeks early. Five of them are apparently doing "as well as can be expected", which given their prematurity and very low birth weights will undoubtedly mean problems ahead. The sixth baby faces "greater challenges". Their mother was offered "selective reduction", which is a way of dealing with bad decisions made during fertility treatment, but felt unable to take that option. In this particular case, it wasn't that too many embryos had been transferred during IVF. These sextuplets were the result of IUI. In this country, when a fertility specialist stimulates the ovaries during IUI, the treatment is tailored to aim to produce one or at most two eggs. Any responsible specialist would immediately stop treatment if there was a danger of this this kind of risky high-order multiple pregnancy. According to the article I read, there are as many as 2,000 cases of selective reduction each year in the States, and it's little wonder that there is sometimes such vehement opposition to fertility treatment. The fact that it is "hard to regulate" IUI seems to be the excuse - but surely it is time for fertility specialists to face up to the consequences of the treatments they are offering. Our system in the UK is not without faults, but it's only when you see what can happen in other places that you realise quite how lucky we are. See the article in question here

IVF risks

If you'd read some of the newspaper headlines about IVF this morning, you could be forgiven for getting into a bit of a panic. It sounded as if going through IVF put you at a hugely increased risk of having a baby with Down's syndrome, and that it was the drugs used during fertility treatment which caused the problem.

This research is undeniably interesting, but it's far from conclusive. The eggs of just 34 couples were examined, far too few to be truly representative, and the reason for the problems they found is not clear either. They saw that when older women took higher doses of fertility drugs during treatment, there were abnormalities in the eggs which were produced. These abnormalities appear to be different from the more common problems which occur in older women's eggs anyway.

There are a number of things that need to be understood about this. The eggs studied were far more likely to lead to an unsuccessful treatment cycle or a miscarriage than to a baby with serious problems. The researchers have suggested that ovarian stimulation could disturb the normal process of egg production, but it is also not clear whether the fertility drugs caused problems for the eggs or whether the treatment allowed eggs to be produced from the ovaries which might otherwise never have got as far as being released.

So, we would like to see more research in this field to discover whether pushing older women's ovaries to produce more eggs actually only results in larger numbers of poor quality eggs - but in the meantime you can find out more about the research at www.eshre.eu