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(sz) Chemicals commonly found in food packaging, upholstery and carpets may be damaging women’s fertility, say US scientists.
A study published in the journal Human Reproduction measured levels of perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) in the blood of 1,240 women.
Those with higher levels were more likely to take longer to become pregnant.
UK experts said more research was needed to confirm a link.
PFCs are useful in industry because they are resistant to heat, and have the ability to repel water and oil.
However, high concentrations have been linked to organ damage in animals, and the chemicals have the ability to persist for long periods in the body.
The researchers, from the University of California in Los Angeles, analysed blood samples taken at the time of the woman’s first antenatal visit, then interviewed the women about whether the pregnancy was planned, and how long it had taken them to get pregnant.
The levels of the chemicals varied from 6.4 nanograms per millilitre of blood - a nanogram is a billionth of a gram - to 106.4 nanograms per ml.
When the group of women were divided into four groups depending on these levels, they found that, compared to women in the group with the lowest readings, the likelihood of infertility - taking more than a year or IVF to get pregnant - was significantly higher for women with higher levels of PFCs in their bloodstream.
Dr Chunyuan Fei, one of the researchers, said that earlier studies had suggested that PFCs might impair the growth of babies in the womb. more…

From: »The BBC«

(wz) As many as 500 delegates from across the country and abroad will converge on the city for the 14th National Congress on Assisted Reproductive Techniques and Advances in Infertility Management (ISAR 2009) to be held between January 29 and February 1.
According to Sanjay Gupte, organizing chairman of the event, “Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is an issue that has been courting controversies. Largely because no clear scientific and legal guidelines exist.” Medico-legal issues surrounding ART will be discussed extensively at the conference.
The congress is structured as two days of workshops at various institutions like Gupte Hospital and Research Centre, Ruby Hall IVF and Endoscopy Centre and the Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC). This will be followed by an extensive conference at Le Meridien, said gynecologist Sunita Tandulwadkar, chief of the IVF and endoscopy unit of Ruby Hall Clinic.
The scientific meet will highlight various strategies of infertility management and its advances. Togas Tulandi, doctor and professor of obstetrics and gynecology (Canada), will be the key speaker and talk on Changing Concept in Infertility Management’, she added.
Senior and experienced faculty members from abroad, who will attend the congress, include professors Gab Kovacs (Australia), Ian Cooke (UK), Anne Loft (Denmark), Daniel Franfin (South Africa), Enver Dirican (Turkey), Ashok Agarwal (USA), Suresh Katera (Singapore) and Ying Shen (Germany). more…

From: »Times Of India«

(cs) Houston IVF recently opened a new state-of-the-art Infertility Center on the campus of Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center in Houston, Texas. The 26,000 square-foot facility, located at 929 Gessner Road and the I-10 Freeway, provides a one-stop shop for infertility treatment, and includes four embryo transfer rooms, two egg retrieval rooms, and a certified laboratory deemed ‘one of the cleanest in the world’ by Antonia Gilligan, President of Alpha Environmental, Inc.
The new infertility center is one of the centerpieces of the new $500 million, 36-story Memorial Hermann Tower, which the hospital is promoting as ‘the new center of Houston medicine,’ and the largest structure on the I-10 corridor in West Houston. Recent additions to the Memorial City campus are aimed at providing the quality care of the Texas Medical Center without the perceived logistical inconvenience. “Couples coming to Houston IVF can be sure that they are receiving world-class care in a calm, peaceful, and pleasant environment” said Timothy Hickman, medical director of Houston IVF.
Hickman notes that the planning for the new center took over a year. “Our layout is modeled in part after the Cornell program in New York City, where all services are offered in a skyscraper-like facility, and modeled in part after our sister clinic, the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, which boasts one of the best IVF laboratories in the world.” Houston IVF occupies the 23rd floor of the new structure, doubling the capacity of their previous offices. more…

From: »PR-USA.net«

(sz) cientists have developed a ground-breaking method for testing the quality of a sperm before it is used in IVF and increase the chances of conception.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), have created a way of chemically ‘fingerprinting’ individual sperm to give an indication of quality.
Scientists can then consider whether the sperm is healthy enough to be used to fertilise an egg as part of an IVF treatment.
The sperm are captured in two highly focussed beams of laser light. Trapped in what are essentially ‘optical tweezers’, an individual sperm’s DNA properties are identified by the pattern of the vibrations they emit in a process known as Raman spectroscopy.
This is the first time this process has been used to evaluate DNA damage in sperm.
“In natural conception the fittest and healthiest sperm are positively selected by the arduous journey they make to the egg. What our technology does is to replace natural selection with a DNA based ‘quality score’,” says Dr Alistair Elfick, lead scientist on the project. “But this is not about designer babies. We can only tell if the sperm is strong and healthy not if it will produce a baby with blue eyes.”
In the past quality tests of sperm have mostly been carried out on the basis of shape and activity. While these do give some indication of health of the sperm they do not give its DNA status. more…

From: »laboratory equipment«

(wz) Thirty years ago last summer, the world’s first ‘test-tube’ baby was born, and since then more than 1 million infants have been successfully conceived through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the technique in which a woman’s eggs and man’s sperm are fertilised in a laboratory and then implanted in the mother’s womb.
When deciding whether or not to pursue IVF treatment, the obvious question of most patients is, ‘What is the chance that this therapy will result in a baby?’ They now have an answer.
In the largest study of IVF patients to date, researchers at Boston IVF and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre (BIDMC) followed more than 6,000 women through six IVF cycles. Their findings, described in tomorrow’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) demonstrate that the chances of a successful live birth following IVF therapy range between 65 and 86 percent in younger women and between 23 and 42 percent in women aged 40 and older.
‘This shows that, overall, IVF is extraordinarily effective and largely overcomes infertility, especially in younger women,’ explains lead author Beth Malizia, MD, a clinical fellow at Boston IVF and in the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at BIDMC.
Infertility affects more than 6 million women in the U.S. between ages 15 and 44, according to figures from the National Centre for Health Statistics. The authors embarked on the study in order to provide doctors and their patients with accurate, evidence-based estimates of the likelihood that a pregnancy resulting from IVF would result in a live birth.
‘Traditionally, IVF has been reported as pregnancies per IVF cycle,’ explains Malizia. ‘These calculations can not only be difficult to comprehend, but can also be misleading since they don’t take into account the difference in success between the first-time patient and the patient who did not become pregnant in previous IVF attempts. Our goal in conducting this study was to provide information that would answer the patient’s primary question - What is the chance that I will walk away with a baby?’ more…

From: »Science Centric«

(sz) Scientists have determined the chances of having a successful live birth following IVF (in vitro fertilisation) treatment.
During IVF, a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm are fertilised in a laboratory and then implanted in the woman’s womb. The first IVF baby was born just over 30 years ago and since then, more than one million infants have been conceived using this treatment.
According to US researchers, when deciding whether or not to pursue IVF treatment, the obvious question most patients ask is, ‘what is the chance that this therapy will result in a baby?’ They now have an answer.
In the largest study of IVF patients to date, US researchers followed the progress of more than 6,000 women through six IVF cycles.
They found that the chances of a successful live birth following IVF therapy ranged between 65 and 86% in women under the age of 35 and between 23 and 42% in women aged 40 or older.
“This shows that, overall, IVF is extraordinarily effective and largely overcomes infertility, especially in younger women,” said lead author, Dr Beth Malizia of IVF centre, Boston IVF.
Dr Malizia explained that traditionally, IVF has been reported as pregnancies per IVF cycle. However these calculations cab be difficult to comprehend. They can also be misleading because they do not take into account the difference in success between first time patients and patients who did not become pregnant in previous IVF attempts.
“Our goal in conducting this study was to provide information that would answer the patient’s primary question – What is the chance that I will walk away with a baby?” she explained.
Each IVF cycle consists of four steps:
-The patient takes a course of fertility medication to encourage egg development.
-Eggs are then retrieved through a minor surgical procedure.
-The retrieved eggs are then fertilised in the laboratory.
-Approximately three to six days following egg retrieval, fertilised embryos are implanted in the woman’s uterus. more…

From: »irishhealth.com«

(wz) The news last week that prenatal testing for autism might be on the cards was rather spun out of shape: we are not on the verge of a test — not right now, anyway – but work by the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University shows we are heading that way.
The team found that babies exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb had a higher risk of developing autistic traits. Previous research had shown that high levels of testosterone were associated with less eye contact by a child’s first birthday, slower language development by their second birthday, more peer difficulties by their fourth birthday and more difficulties with empathy by their sixth birthday.
The new study, reported in an article for the British Journal of Psychology, links testosterone to poor social skills and imagination and good attention to, and memory for, detail, as well as a love of repetition. The findings all seem to be heading towards one conclusion, which is (to paraphrase and condense wildly) that autism is a sort of extreme form of the “male brain”.
Discussing the findings, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the centre, said: “It is important to note that this research does not demonstrate that elevated foetal testosterone is associated with a clinical diagnosis of autism or Asperger’s syndrome; to do that would need a sample size of thousands, not hundreds. Our ongoing collaboration with the Biobank in Denmark will enable us to test that link in the future.”
This last sentence was used to suggest that pregnant women will soon be able to undergo tests that detect autism in their unborn child, just as embryos can be tested for Down’s syndrome. But autism is not straightforward, by which I mean it doesn’t boil down to a single gene doing odd things, or duplicating itself, or having bits of material slide off it. more…

From: »The Times«

(cz) Scientists have developed a ground-breaking method for testing the quality of a sperm before it is used in IVF and increase the chances of conception.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), have created a way of chemically ‘fingerprinting’ individual sperm to give an indication of quality.
Scientists can then consider whether the sperm is healthy enough to be used to fertilise an egg as part of an IVF treatment.
The sperm are captured in two highly focussed beams of laser light. Trapped in what are essentially ‘optical tweezers’, an individual sperm’s DNA properties are identified by the pattern of the vibrations they emit in a process known as Raman spectroscopy. This is the first time this process has been used to evaluate DNA damage in sperm.
Dr Alistair Elfick, lead scientist on the project, said: “In natural conception the fittest and healthiest sperm are positively selected by the arduous journey they make to the egg. What our technology does is to replace natural selection with a DNA based ‘quality score’. But this is not about designer babies. We can only tell if the sperm is strong and healthy not if it will produce a baby with blue eyes.” more…

From: »innovations report«

(cz) A controversial plan for a sperm and egg donor registry has sparked concerns donations will end and women will be forced into one night stands to conceive.
Under new State Government regulations for the fertility industry, a database containing highly confidential and sensitive information about donors will be handled by government staff.
But fertility specialist Dr Joel Bernstein, from Fertility East in Bondi Junction, said the “over-policing” could turn donors away and may affect hundreds of couples who can’t be helped by IVF.
“It could turn responsible reproduction into irresponsible reproduction. Donations will reduce and I have little doubt that women will go down to the pub or ask a friend (to donate).”
One in six couples in Australia is infertile and many go overseas to find a donor due to the shortage.
Donations plummeted when the law changed in 2004 allowing offspring access to information on their donor once they turned 18. It is believed only a dozen men are registered donors in NSW.
The draft Assisted Reproductive Technology Regulation, on display until February 27, will also allow inspectors to enter fertility clinics to view records and take samples.
“I think the Government should be encouraging more donors and not (taking) an aggressive approach,” Dr Bernstein said. more…

From: »The Daily Telegraph« (Australia)

(sz) In vitro fertilization cannot reverse the effects of aging on fertility in women older than age 40, but the procedure does give infertile women younger than age 35 the same chance of having a child as their fertile peers, according to a new study by Harvard Medical School researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Washington Post reports.
The study analyzed data from 6,164 patients who underwent 14,248 cycles of IVF between 2000 and 2005 at a Boston clinic. According to the Post, it is the most extensive assessment to date of the chance of giving birth after IVF for women of various ages. Researchers found that the cumulative live-birth rate after six cycles among women of all age groups was 72% when researchers assumed that patients who did not continue IVF cycles would have the same chance of a live birth as patients who continued with IVF.
A more conservative analysis, which assumed that there were no live births among patients who did not return for additional cycles, found that the success rate was about 51%. Lead author Alan Penzias said that the actual rate is probably somewhere between the two estimates. According to Penzias, the new study is the first to examine a widespread population of women, including older women and women who used both fresh and frozen eggs. Penzias said, “Among the younger women, it was nice to see that we are able to put them back in the same category as their fertile peers.” He added, “For older women, we can restore [them] back to the same chance as fertile women of [their] age, but we can’t make everyone have the same fertility as a 35-year-old. IVF does not reverse the clock.”
The Post reports that the reason IVF cannot reverse age-related infertility is that the procedure can help women who are infertile because of blocked fallopian tubes or endometriosis, but it cannot counteract aging effects on a woman’s ovaries or eggs. Treatment for older women therefore is limited to using eggs donated by a younger woman. more…

From: »Medical News Today«