How many eggs is enough?

The winning number is. . . 15. An analysis has been done of over 40,000 IVF cycles by women in England and the results indicate that 15 is the magic number. If 15 eggs can be retrieved from a woman’s ovaries in a single cycle this will give her the best chance of achieving a live birth through various types of assisted reproductive technology.

The study is published in Human Reproduction. Researchers discovered there is actually a very strong correlation between success rate and number of eggs harvested. The live birth rate rose as egg culmination did until hitting the number 15. Success leveled out and the started a decline at 20.

“This is the first study to look at the association between the number of eggs and live births. Some smaller studies have reported previously on the association between egg numbers and pregnancy rates, but not live births. This is also the first study to devise a graph that can be used by patients and clinicians to estimate the chances of a live birth for a given number of eggs,” explained Dr. Arri Coomarasamy, one of the authors, a clinical reader and consultant in Reproductive Medicine and Surgery at the University of Birmingham (UK).

They created a predictive model based on data from successful ART pregnancies, or live births. They created a graph called a nomogram which shows the relationship between women’s age, the number of eggs retrieved and the predicted live birth rate. This can be used by doctors and patients to determine the degree of ovarian stimulation to grab the most advantageous number of eggs.

For now this data does not link frozen and fresh egg cycles. There may be a difference in the success rate once frozen eggs are mixed in. Hopefully, this will be the next study and results will be released in the future.

Source: Human Reproduction, MedicalNewsToday