Our Success
We measure our success in our ability to enable patients to take a healthy baby home. The quickest and most effective way to do this is to have a single blastocyst transferred. A blastocycst is a five day old embryo.
The graph below shows our cumulative live birth rate (2007-2009) from a single egg retrieval when at least one blastocyst was available for freezing. The cumulative live birth rate refers to all the live births resulting from a single stimulated egg retrieval including the transfer of any frozen embryos generated from this egg retrieval during this period. There are still patients that have not yet used any/all of their frozen embryos, so these cumulative results will further increase with time.
Why Blastocyst Culture?
Blastocyst transfers have become the treatment of choice for the majority of patients at Monash IVF clinics. A blastocyst is formed after a fertilised egg is cultured in the laboratory for five days. Culturing embryos for this long helps us identify those embryos that have the best chance of resulting in a baby.
Best Selection
We culture all your embryos individually because it is important to track how they are progressing and determine whether the individual embryos are meeting all their developmental milestones.We look at whether the fertilised egg has progressed 24 hours after insemination and how they grow daily. This information allows us to select the best embryo for transfer.
Not all embryos are successful at becoming blastocysts – some embryos (10-15%) don’t make the transition from day 2 to day 3 and stop growing. About 70% of embryos that stop growing and therefore don’t make it to the blastocyst stage, display gross chromosomal (genetic) abnormalities. By culturing your embryos to the blastocyst stage we can select out these embryos that would naturally stop growing and not implant.
Extending the culture of embryos to five days requires a considerable investment in technology and expertise. Our experience, our equipment and commitment to quality ensures that our laboratory conditions do not compromise the health of your embryos. The environment the embryos are exposed to in the laboratory is regulated and extensively monitored to have the optimal conditions for embryo growth.
Best Environment
Naturally, your egg is fertilised in the fallopian tube. The embryo starts to divide soon after and will take the next 3-4 days to travel down the fallopian tube. It generally arrives in the uterine cavity on day 5 when it has developed into a blastocyst. Importantly, the environment in different parts of the fallopian tubes and the uterine cavity is specifically suited to the developmental stage of the embryo. In other words, a 2-day old embryo prefers to be in the fallopian tube rather than in the uterus.
The culture media we use to grow blastocsyts is changed over regularly. This way we can ensure the embryo gets the right nutrients for each stage of its development.
Will Your Treatment Be Successful?
Your IVF Specialist will explain your chances of success, taking into consideration your type of infertility, your age and type of treatment. Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) procedures have progressed rapidly since their development and so have the associated success rates, but generalised success rates can be misleading due to the individuality of each patient's situation. There are many hurdles to cross during treatment and it is wise to keep in mind that they all have to be successfully crossed to get to what we are all striving for - a baby to take home.
Success rates can be affected by many factors, including:
- Genetic factors
- Fertility history
- Age of the female partner
- Lifestyle factors including weight and smoking
- Conditions contributing to infertility
- Quality of eggs and number of eggs recovered
- Quality of sperm (including motility and ability to penetrate the egg)