Preventing More Miscarriages in IVF

If you've suffered through the heartbreak of multiple miscarriage, you know what a traumatic experience it can be. While it is painful for everyone, it adds insult to injury when you've just spent thousands of dollars and gone through the rigorous IVF process.

A new test that's just being released now may help prevent such miscarriages from happening.

One of the first patients in the US to try it, Sheila Gruber, 34, had suffered two consecutive miscarriages prior to undergoing a form of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryonic analysis that allows geneticists to examine about one-fourth of the entire human genome – 40 times more than possible with other technology – in eliminating severely flawed chromosomes.

Most embryos cannot survive if they are either missing or possessing an extra chromosome, a condition known as aneuploidy. This test weeds out, so to speak, those embryos with the flawed chromosomes. The technology – micro-array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) – has become available as a diagnostic tool only in the last 12 to 24 months.

If you are a repeat miscarrier and are preparing for another round of IVF, you may want to talk with your fertility specialist about this test.