IVF Success Rates

FAQs

• What are my chances of getting pregnant/having a baby?

  Your chances depend on your specific situation. Pregnancy is a very complex process that depends on the availability of “good” eggs and “good” sperm, as well as a uterus and hormone system that will produce a happy environment for implantation of an embryo. Some of the factors that help our fertility specialists determine your chances of getting pregnant include:

  • Age
  • How well the patient’s ovaries work
  • Whether the intended father has sufficient and good quality sperm
  • Your lifestyle, including habits such as exercise, smoking, diet, etc.

  For these reasons, we can only estimate a pregnancy rate based on each couple’s unique circumstances.

• Can you calculate the possibility for successful pregnancy?

  Pregnancy rates can be calculated based on the number of patients beginning treatment, the number of patients going for egg retrieval, or the number of patients having an embryo transfer. Each of these gives information to a clinician or embryologist, but most patients are interested in the probability of having a live birth once he or she starts treatment. This is often referred to as the live birth rate per initiated IVF cycle.

  The problem with this statistic is that the data are always about one year old, as one must wait for a baby to be born to count it as a live birth. Because of this, pregnancy rates sometimes include live births as well as those that are still in the uterus but have not yet been born. This is often referred to as the ongoing pregnancy rate. This pregnancy rate is usually a little bit higher than the live birth rate, but it is usually the most current pregnancy rate and reflects any recent technologies or changes that have been introduced into the clinic and laboratory.

  One other important statistic is what is called the implantation rate. This is a measurement of the chances that a single embryo will implant in the uterus. By using this statistic, one can better understand the chances of having more than one embryo implant in the uterus, and this may aid a patient and the doctor in determining whether to transfer one or two embryos.

  Implantation rates, as well as the other pregnancy rates mentioned above, are typically broken down by female age groups. The common age categories are: <35, 36-37, 38-39, and >40.

• How should I choose a fertility center?

  All fertility centers are required to report to the CDC. IVFMD voluntarily reports their statistics to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (SART), which then forwards them to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). For reasons previously mentioned, these statistics, are usually at least two years old. As an example, for 2017, the most recent statistics compiled by SART are for 2015.

  Using these data to compare success between different clinics may be misleading for several reasons. For example, a clinic with the highest pregnancy rates may not be the best clinic, as they may achieve their higher rate by transferring more embryos to the uterus and therefore increasing the risks to both mother and child. SART has guidelines for the number of embryos to transfer in order to decrease risks to mother and child, and IVFMD strictly adheres to those guidelines. For this reason, it is always important to examine the mean number of embryos transferred. Another example to show why it may be misleading to compare IVF clinics is that one center may not allow certain groups of women to undergo IVF for fear they will lower their pregnancy rates.