Failure of the 1st attempt at assisted reproduction justifies at least 1 additi...( This release is also available in A H...)

This release is also available in Spanish.

Barcelona, Spain: Research into the effect of age and the number of times women undergo assisted reproduction technology (ART) shows that for younger women, the overwhelming majority achieve a pregnancy within the first two attempts, whereas women over the age of 40 had a more consistent, but lower, pregnancy rate of about 20% throughout their first four attempts.

Mr Simon Hong told the 24th annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Barcelona today (Tuesday): "The purpose of this study was to try to identify, at least in our practice, if a patient in a certain age group should repeat a cycle and how many. We found that the overwhelming majority of women who became pregnant (96%) achieved pregnancy by their second attempt, although the probability of a pregnancy after the third and fourth attempts remains encouraging. These results confirm that there is negative correlation between achieving pregnancy and increasing the number of attempts. Nonetheless, for all patients undergoing ART treatment, failure of the first attempt justifies at least one additional cycle."

Mr Hong is a researcher at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, Cornell University (New York, USA), which is headed by Professor Gianpiero Palermo who pioneered the intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) technique.

Mr Hong and his colleagues analysed 8,970 ICSI cycles carried out in 6,719 patients treated between September 1993 and December 2007. The women were categorised into three groups: those aged 35 or younger, those aged 36-39, and those aged 40 and over. The average age was 36.5. Mr Hong examined the number of women achieving pregnancy at each attempt in each age group.

"The overall pregnancy rate, regardless of the mothers' age, was 39.2% 3,515 pregnancies o
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