Taller women having twins with IVF DET

Taller women are more likely to have dizygotic or non identical twin pregnancies after double embryo transfer (DET), researchers have found. “This is a further step towards the development of tailor-made personalized IVF treatment,” said Dr. Marieke Lambers, from VUMC, Gynaecology Obstetrics and Reproductive Medicine, Amsterdam. These findings give doctors more information to better assist their patients to successful and healthy pregnancies.

This is the first time that maternal height has been shown to have an impact on implantation. With natural twinning it’s impossible to know what the contributing factors are. With this research they looked at the personal data of thousands of women including height, the number of eggs transplanted and whether they were fresh or frozen and pregnancy outcomes. “When we came to analyse the twin group, we found that a maternal height over 1.74m (five feet seven inches) and more than 11 oocytes retrieved were independently associated with twin pregnancies,” concluded Dr. Lambers.

“Doctors working in IVF are faced with a constant balancing act between giving the best chance of achieving a pregnancy without incurring all the problems associated with multiple births,” Said Dr. Lambers. “We hope that our work could be used in future as a basis for predictive models that assist in the choice between single and double embryo transfer. This is an important topic since multiple pregnancies involve a higher risk of problems for the mother, such as pre-eclampsia, and also for the baby due to pre-term or immature delivery.”

Source: ESHRE, Medical News Today