Michelle Emblenton, biochemist at inviTRA, talks about how pregnancy can be achieved despite low ovarian reserve:
Most women are not aware of their ovarian reserve or if indeed there is a low ovarian reserve until they try to become pregnant. If after a year of regular unprotected sex a couple fails to achieve pregnancy naturally, they should think about going to an assisted reproduction clinic for some fertility testing. If you're over the age of 35, the recommendation is to wait no longer than 6 months, as age is one of the biggest contributing factors to infertility issues. Your doctors will then prescribe some fertility studies to measure things such as your ovarian reserve, look at your reproductive system and check everything is in working order to find out the reasons why pregnancy has not been achieved. When all the factors have been studied, a strategy will de developed by your specialist taking into account the needs of the patients. Possible treatments for women presenting a low ovarian reserve could be as follows:
If your ovarian reserve is compromised, your specialist may recommend treatment with IVF. The first step in an IVF procedure is ovarian stimulation, where your ovaries will be stimulated with hormonal medication to encourage several eggs to develop at once, and then they will program a folicular puncture which is an egg retrieval process where they will collect all of the mature eggs in one go. This is an outpatient surgery performed under sedation or mild anesthesia. If your ovarian reserve is very limited, your specialist may require that you undergo the ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval process in a few consecutive cycles in order to gain a supply of eggs in which to go to the next step. The next step of the IVF process is the fertilization, followed by the embryo transfer into the woman's uterus.
In more serious cases, where the ovarian reserve is practically depleted or perhaps in a very advanced maternal age, your specialist may recommend an IVF treatment with donor eggs. Although it can be really hard to get to grasp with the idea that you won't be passing on your genetic load to your children when you use donor eggs, this technique has allowed many many women to become mothers.Indeed, if you're looking at this treatment psychological counseling is recommended to help you understand and accept this treatment. One of the very large advantages of using donor eggs in IVF is that the eggs come from young, healthy individuals, and very high success rates are achieved with using donor eggs compared to using own eggs.
Another thing to consider here is that, because ovarium reserve decreases with age and today's society many many women want to delay motherhood, it's important to think about fertility preservation. If you are a younger woman and you know you don't want to become a mother until maybe the ages of 35, for whatever reason, then think about preserving your fertility by vitrifying some of your eggs, which can be used later for IVF. In this way, you can become your own egg donor for your future self. In order to preserve your fertility, you will under go ovarian stimulation to mature several eggs that will be collected in an egg retrieval procedure. These oocytes will then be vitrified and stored in liquid nitrogen indefinitely until you need to use them in the future.
