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How does genetic testing help IVF success rates?
Dr. Paul Brezina, director, Reproductive Genetics, Fertility Associates of Memphis: So, there’s some really exciting stuff that’s coming down the pike in reproductive medicine. One of the things that’s already here is genetic testing.
And we know that for most couples going through fertility treatments, about half of the embryos they make are going to be not viable and they’re going to either not result in an implantation or they’re going to result in a miscarriage.
And so, one of the chief challenges over the last, since this field started, and really since people have been having kids, has been increasing the efficiency of this and helping people achieve a family on a timeline that works for them.
So, something that reproductive medicine and specifically in vitro fertilization has done has given people so much more control over that within their lives. And this, I think, is just the next evolution that’s really pushed that forward.
What we’re able to do is obtain eggs from an IVF cycle, fertilize those eggs, and we get embryos. We’re able to take a small piece, just a cell or two off the placenta from those embryos, and we’re able to learn a lot about those embryos.
We’re able to learn what their potential is going to be. And this has resulted in just fantastic increase in pregnancy rates in our program and across the country.
At least 50 percent of the embryos that we get in an IVF cycle are going to be abnormal.
Typically what we’ve done to overcome that is to put back more than one embryo. And that carries with it problems, such as multiple gestations and just decreased efficiency as far as what we know we’re putting back.
What this technology allows us to do is put back one embryo and have the same or better pregnancy rate than we would with two untested embryos. And that just does so much for our patients.
It allows them to get pregnant in a quicker way, a more efficient way and a safer way, and we bring down the miscarriage rate by about half.
So, I think that this is going to become more and more the standard in IVF and I think that the implications for this technology moving forward are really exciting.
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