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What if you were trying to get pregnant using in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and suddenly had a greater than 50% chance of succeeding? It's not quite there yet, but a new study has found that using computer-automated, time‐lapse photography of embryos in the laboratory during IVF may improve embryo selection, potentially increasing the chances of pregnancy among women undergoing the procedure, according to newswise.com. As someone who went through this more than once, finally succeeding on the third, fourth and fifth tries (but only one live birth), it raises a real beacon of hope. In the past women were given (at least when I did it, 13 years ago) a 30% chance of success, based on the average woman in good health.  The good news is, it worked a lot of the time, especially for younger women.  But for women in their 40s like me, the success rate was far less impressive. Now labs may actually be able to use a device which records images of developing embryos during the ...

Obese women have to w o rry about heart disease and diabetes and cancer.  Now a new study has found that   in vitro fertilization   (IVF) probably won't work for them either. That's because they need a bigger dose of hormones to account for their weight.   Obese women may need a different dose of medication than normal weight women in order to successfully have their eggs harvested for IVF procedures, according to newswise.com. But that comes with a caution, at least from me, who is not a medical person but who developed breast cancer after four IVFs, because, I'm convinced, of the hormones. If you get a bigger dose, does that increase your chances of cancer?  This has been studied, and is starting to appear true, but because fertility treatments are such a money-maker (my guess), the issue hasn't been addressed loudly enough. (I'd think it was just me, my bad luck, except many of my friends who also did IVF have breast cancer, too.) But, back to the s...

It sounds bizarre (and painful), but doctors in Britain have found a way to double the chances that a woman will get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) by simply scratching her endometrium . According to bmj.com, "Endometrial scratching involves causing intentional damage to the endometrium through biopsy or curettage. An association between endometrial scratching and an increased chance of pregnancy was first described a decade ago, although the underlying mechanism remains unknown." Katie Moisse reports at abcnews.com that the procedure , called local endometrial injury, takes about 15 minutes and costs as little as $200.  Women are locally anesthetized, then scraped quickly with a sharp instrument.  Doctors liken it to a Pap smear. "Because the success rate of IVF is modest, these results are of considerable interest since the proposed intervention is neither expensive nor time-consuming and is apparently devoid of significant complications," Moi...

You're not going to believe this (I barely did).  But researchers in London say it may be possible to do IVF procedures for a little over $200 for women in developing countries. That's because embryos apparently require very little care, according to Maria Cheng at the AP.  " A human embryo doesn't need much beyond some basic solutions, a steady pH level and constant temperature," she quotes  Jonathan Van Blerkom, a fertility expert at the University of Colorado,  who developed the new procedure. . "My first reaction was, 'You've got to be kidding,'" he says to Cheng in the article.  The simpler approach allows women to take cheaper fertility tablets to stimulate their ovaries to release more than one egg per month. In conventional IVF, expensive, potent drugs that are injected can produce more than 20 eggs, Cheng notes. With just two test tubes and special solutions, "it's possible to generate the exact same conditions, or ver...

First there was the breast cancer scare (not yet fully documented, but anecdotally, it's there), then the possibility that male babies born using a method to pierce the egg to allow sperm in may also make them  infertile, and now researchers are saying that babies born through IVF have a slightly higher risk of mental retardation . Researchers admit it's a small percentage of babies born this way, but it's statistically significant, and applies mainly to multiple births. According to a story at newswise.com, 1.5% of children born through IVF in Sweden are autistic, and 1.1%, have been diagnosed with mental retardation. This new study, conducted in Sweden on more than 2.5 million children that compared those conceived through natural means to those through IVF procedures, has found an increased risk of both autism and mental retardation.  The prevalence of this disorder is small, but scientists say it is not seen in the general population of babies conceived naturally....