Promising new fertility treatment you haven't heard of yet

01.09.2015

Imagine doing IVF, but with way less meds and for half the price—sounds intriguing, right? Welcome to the world of in-vitro maturation, a fertility treatment that's already in practice overseas but is just starting to make waves in the States.

"Thousands of babies are born in Asia, Europe, and Canada from IVM , but in America, it's still not a common phenomenon," says Dr. Janelle Luk of Neway Fertility, a NYC-based clinic that is one of just a few to offer the treatment domestically. "From an American medicine point of view, it's still considered very experimental." However, Luk says that may soon be changing, due to increased media interest in IVM and more patients asking about it as a result.

So what is IVM, anyway, and how does it differ from IVF? Here's the breakdown: while the IVF process requires ovarian stimulation (via hormone shots) to produce multiple eggs for retrieval, IVM takes an opposite approach by retrieving and then maturing eggs outside the body in the lab setting. As a result, far fewer medications are required, and they must only be taken for three days, as opposed to the two-week span often needed for effective IVF stimulation.

IVM is mostly geared toward patients who have PCOS (a condition that causes irregular menstrual cycles and difficulty ovulating), according to Luk. In the IVF setting, women with PCOS often produce lots of eggs—often too many, causing painful and sometimes dangerous hyper-stimulation—and many are often immature, yielding poor results. "These women may have a mechanism in their hormones working against the eggs," says Luk. "[With IVM], we're able to give the eggs they boost they need to mature and prepare them for fertilization."

As for to day, Luk has treated 15 cases with IVM at Neway Fertility, nine of which have resulted in live births - that's about a 60 percent success rate. At her clinic, an IVM procedure costs $6,500, plus around $800 for medication — whereas the average cost of IVF with meds is anywhere between $11,000-$13,000 according to RESOLVE.

If it is cheaper and possibly more effective, why aren't more women doing it? For one, it takes a special kind of medical skill, says Luk. "Both the doctors and embryologists must be specially trained," she says. "With IVM, we retrieve egg follicles as small as eight or nine millimeters, so the doctor understand how to use a very small needle."

Though IVM is still gaining traction in medical circle and with the general public, it could be a promising—and more cost-effective—way to get pregnant for women who fit the PCOS profile.

Based on: redbookmag.com