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(sz) In a major effort to streamline the functioning of fertility centres in the country, the Cabinet recently introduced a federal law on licensing of these facilities with the aim of ensuring that all IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) centres in the country operate in accordance with Islamic values and ethics.
Contentious issues like legality of father, surrogating, storing and banking of sperms and other related matters are regulated under the provisions of the law.
Aspects relating to licensing of medical, technical and administrative cadres, and the medical instruments and devices the fertilisation centres must obtain are also specified in the law.
In March, in an exclusive report, Khaleej Times had revealed that the government was mulling a draft bill to curb violations committed by some fertility centres in the country and streamline practices at these facilities. The report stated that the Ministry of Health (MoH) finalised a draft law on preventing fertilisation centres from breaching the country’s legal, social and ethical values. more…

From: »Khaleej Times Online« (U.A.E)

(sz) Women who cannot have IVF or have sudden ovarian failure, cancer, or for other reasons cannot have drugs to stimulate their ovaries to mature eggs, were given fresh hope yesterday when doctors in Canada announced the birth of the first baby that was born from an egg that was harvested while immature, matured in a test tube and then frozen and thawed to be used later.
The baby girl is now about one year old. Her mother has polycystic ovarian syndrome which means she could not receive the usual hormonal treatment to mature her eggs as this would over stimulate her ovaries. Overstimulated ovaries cause follicles to swell up and absorb fluid which leads to kidney failure.
The research that produced the new experimental treatment was conducted by Hanahel Holzer and colleagues at the McGill Reproductive Centre in Montreal.
The study was reported by Holzer to the 23rd annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) which is taking place in Lyon, France.
Holzer and colleagues took unmatured eggs from the prospective mother’s ovaries and matured them in the lab using hormones. The eggs were then frozen to be thawed later when needed. more…

From: »Medical News Today«

(wz) IVF is expensive and harrowing, and carries significant health risks. That is why some fertility experts are turning to an alternative method called ‘mild IVF’, which they say is cheaper, safer and equally effective. But Britain’s most powerful fertility doctors remain to be convinced.
Just two days after she started fertility treatment, Temilola Akinbolagbe, 33, collapsed at a bus stop in south London. She was rushed to hospital but suffered a massive heart attack. Five days later, they switched off her life-support machine. Temilola had been a healthy young woman. All she had wanted was a baby, but her body suffered a fatal reaction to the drugs she was given to stimulate her ovaries.
She’s not the only woman to die as a result of IVF. In August last year, 37-year-old Nina Thanki died at Leicester Royal Infirmary after problems developed while eggs were being retrieved from her ovaries. Her devastated husband said they never imagined for a moment that she might not survive the treatment. “If the hospital had told me there was even a 1% risk of Nina dying I would have said no, we are not doing this,” Rajesh Thanki told the Daily Mail. “All we wanted was a child. How could this happen?”
An inquest is still pending and the precise cause of death has not yet been established.
Probably, nobody was to blame for either of these deaths. The fact is that IVF carries risks. That is not something most women, so desperate for a baby they will try anything, want to hear. They probably don’t hear it when they are told. But IVF, as it is usually practised today in the UK, is an experimental medical intervention and there is a chance of becoming ill as a result of it and a very rare possibility of death. more…

From: »The Guardian« (UK)

(sz) A technique for testing the health of an IVF embryo makes it less, rather than more, likely that a woman will have a successful pregnancy and birth, a study has found.
The test, which involves taking and analysing a single cell from an early embryo, appears to increase the risk of failed pregnancies or stillbirths, despite being a tool for detecting abnormal chromosomes.
Scientists who carried out the study warned yesterday that preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) should not be carried out routinely on older women who are trying to have a baby through IVF treatment.
They based their warning on a study of 408 women aged beween 35 and 41, half of whom were given PGS before their IVF embryos were implanted into the womb. The scientists then compared rates of pregnancies and live-births between the two groups.
“We found that, at 12 weeks, 25 per cent of the women in the PGS group were pregnant, whereas 37 per cent of the control group had an ongoing pregnancy,” said Sebastiaan Mastenbroek of the University of Amsterdam.
“And the women in the PGS group also had a significantly lower live-birth rate - 24 per cent, as opposed to 35 per cent, of the controls,” he said.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first to look at the effects of PGS on the pregnancies and births of a large group of women. It has not, however, explained why PGS should increase the risk of a failed pregnancy. more…

From: »The Independent« (UK)

(wz) Infertile women who supplement their fertility treatment with alternative medicines may be harming their chances of becoming pregnant, according to controversial research by psychologists. A year-long study of 818 women found that those who turned to complementary therapies such as herbal medicines, reflexology and acupuncture while having IVF treatment were at least 30% less likely to become pregnant than women who did not.
A team led by Jacky Boivin, a psychologist at Cardiff University, investigated the effects of alternative therapies because they are increasingly being used by women undergoing fertility treatment. Some herbal treatments are marketed as natural remedies for infertility, while others claim to improve women’s chances of getting pregnant by reducing their stress levels. Dr Boivin said it was unclear what was to blame for the apparent drop in pregnancy rates, but said the effect may be due to herbal medicines interacting with and disrupting drugs and hormones used in fertility treatment. more…

From: »The Guardian« (UK)

(cz) The more complex the assisted reproduction procedure, the more likely the umbilical cord develops in an atypical place or have other abnormalities, a scientist told the 23rd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (Wednesday 4 July). Mrs. Ilse Delbaere, from Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium, said that the study, including over 4000 twin pregnancies, was the first to examine umbilical cord abnormalities in such a large population.
For many years, scientists have known that both singletons and twins conceived after fertility treatment do worse in terms of duration of pregnancy and in live birth weight. “Certain umbilical cord pathologies, such as the insertion of the cord on the placental membranes instead of centrally in the placenta, or the absence of one artery in the cord, are known to correlate with an adverse outcome”, said Mrs Delbaere, “and we wanted to find out whether these cord anomalies were more frequent after assisted reproduction.”
The team studied data from the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey (EFPTS), containing information on all multiple births in the region since 1964. “Since assisted reproduction was rather rare until the mid-eighties”, said Mrs. Delbaere, “we analysed twins born between 1985 and 2004.” The scientists compared cord characteristics from 2119 spontaneously conceived dizygotic (non-identical) twins and 2243 dizygotic twins who had been born as a result of assisted reproduction technologies (ART). Sub analyses looked at the different types of ART according to its ‘invasiveness’ and complexity. more…

From: »Science Daily«

(sz) Evidence gathered from time-lapse recordings of the formation of early embryos (blastocysts) in the laboratory has revealed why embryos created via IVF and undergoing extended culture are more likely to develop into twins than those created via natural conception. Furthermore, the research has shown that the culture in which the IVF embryos are formed is possibly responsible for the embryos dividing into twins.
Dianna Payne, a visiting research fellow at the Mio Fertility Clinic, Yonago, Japan, told the 23rd annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology today (Monday 2 July) that about three pairs of twins per thousand deliveries occurred as a result of natural conception, but many more were born after IVF, even when only one embryo had been transferred to the mother (approximately 21 pairs per thousand deliveries). However, it was not known why this happened.
Using 33 surplus frozen-thawed embryos that had been donated for research, Ms Payne and her colleagues used computer software called MetaMorph [1], which creates a free-running film from single images taken every two minutes with a digital camera attached to a microscope. They then used the software to analyse data from the film.
After thawing, 26 of the 33 embryos (most of which were composed of between two and ten cells) developed to blastocyst stage in which the blastocoele is formed. This is a fluid-filled cavity in the blastocyst and is formed on about day four or five when the embryo forms tight junctions between the cells around its periphery. These outer cells (the trophectoderm) begin to pump fluid into the blastocoelic cavity where a micro-environment is formed in which the cells that will go on to develop into the body of the embryo (the inner cell mass or ICM) develop. more…

From: »Science Daily«

(sz) A woman’s mood may make the difference in conceiving a baby via in vitro fertilization, according to Canadian researchers.
Dr. Christopher Newton, of the University Hospital at Ontario’s London Health Sciences Center, said that his work could lead to a better understanding of the importance of couples’ emotional health during in vitro fertilization and the effect this has on their decision-making.
The researchers asked 129 female fertility patients to undertake a standardized questionnaire, the Profile of Mood States, one month before hospital fertility treatment to measure transient moods such as anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue. The women also completed a Fertility Problem Inventory that assesses and measures infertility-specific social, sexual and relationship stress. more…

From: »EarthTimes«

(wz) Hamilton gynaecologist V P Singh is concerned a fertility treatment which improves the chances of couples not passing their genetic disorders on is not being used to its full potential in the Waikato.
Fertility Associates in Hamilton can now test in-vitro fertilised (IVF) embryos for genetic disorders. The process is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and it screens embryos for diseases such as fragile x and huntington’s disease before the embryos are implanted in the womb. This prevents children being born with disorders such as cystic fibrosis.
But Dr Singh said the PGD service was not being used enough by Waikato patients, despite it being approved for government funding since September 2006. It costs about $12,000 to test embryos for genetic disorders but it is free to couples who test positive for genetic diseases. The Government funds 40 cycles of testing every year around New Zealand.
Dr Singh said PGD had been under-utilised in the Waikato because patients were not aware of the procedure and didn’t understand the science behind it. He said ethical issues which surrounded genetic testing had also prevented PGD from reaching its potential. more…

From: »Waikato Times« (NZ)

(sz) Reproductive endocrinologist, Dr. Robert Anderson, announced today his affiliation with acupuncture fertility specialist, Dr. Grace Pak, who might be able help fertility patients improve the chance for success during in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.
The Southern California Center of Reproductive Medicine’s affiliation with Dr. Pak developed due to the increasing number of requests by IVF patients and Dr. Anderson’s high opinion about acupuncture.
“There have been many attempts to increase the success of IVF through the use of a variety of alternative medicine treatments”, comments Dr. Anderson. He adds, “Over the past few years, acupuncture has become one of the more popular of these treatment modalities. Research shows that it may have a positive impact on the outcome of an IVF cycle.”
There have been a number of studies performed at IVF centers around the world, which have demonstrated that acupuncture may have some benefit in treating infertility when used along with IVF. It has been shown in these studies that there is an increased embryo implantation rate and increased pregnancy rate when acupuncture is used during IVF compared to women who did not undergo acupuncture treatment. more…

From: »PRWeb« (press release)