How does ivf treatment work

Generally, only one embryo is transferred, or two in exceptional cases — this will depend on your individual circumstances and embryo quality. After the transfer, some of the remaining embryos may be suitable for vitrification rapid freezing , and this option is available to all patients undergoing IVF treatment. Frozen embryos can be used in subsequent cycles if the first one is not successful. Step 7: Luteal phase.

The luteal phase is the two-week period between the embryo transfer and the pregnancy test. During this time it is important that you look after yourself and maintain good health and wellbeing. You will be encouraged to limit strenuous activity for 24 hours after the transfer. The progesterone medication you start taking after egg retrieval can sometimes cause tiredness, nausea, cramping and bloating. You may choose to take an analgesic if you experience any discomfort.

If you are concerned by any symptoms, contact your fertility centre and speak with a fertility coordinator. Vaginal spotting or bleeding may happen before you are due for your pregnancy test, but this does not always mean treatment was unsuccessful. Step 8: Pregnancy test. Your pregnancy blood test is due about 14 days after the embryo transfer. Your nurse will phone to give you the results and advise you on the next steps to take on your journey to having a child.

We recognise that the time between embryo transfer and your pregnancy test can be emotionally charged with anxiety and expectation. We understand this can be a difficult time and encourage you to call your clinic for support if you are finding it hard to cope with the stress of waiting. Access to professional counsellors is also available as part of your IVF treatment. We provide personalised, compassionate care and will support you at every step of your fertility journey.

For more information on the cost of treatment, potential risks, who IVF is recommended for and to download a step-by-step infographic of the process, please visit our IVF treatment page. Please leave this field empty. Understanding the Steps of IVF. Understanding the Steps of IVF share. Step 1: Starting treatment During a regular menstrual cycle , hormones from the pituitary gland — Luteinising Hormone LH and Follicle Stimulating Hormone FSH — cooperate in the growth and release of an egg from a fluid-filled follicle within the ovary.

Your treating specialist will have selected the best cycle type for your individual needs. Step 2: Ovarian stimulation This stage involves stimulating the ovaries with medication to promote the growth of follicles containing eggs. Step 3: Trigger injection The ovarian stimulation phase ends once ultrasounds show that the number and size of the follicles are adequate.

Step 5: Fertilisation insemination and embryo development Next, the sperm sample is washed and concentrated, then added to the eggs about four hours after egg retrieval.

Back to Health A to Z. In vitro fertilisation IVF is one of several techniques available to help people with fertility problems have a baby. During IVF, an egg is removed from the woman's ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory.

The fertilised egg, called an embryo, is then returned to the woman's womb to grow and develop. It can be carried out using your eggs and your partner's sperm, or eggs and sperm from donors. These guidelines recommend that IVF should be offered to women under the age of 43 who have been trying to get pregnant through regular unprotected sex for 2 years. Or who have had 12 cycles of artificial insemination, with at least 6 of these cycles using a method called intrauterine insemination IUI.

Read more about the availability of IVF. If you're having trouble getting pregnant, you should start by speaking to your GP. Obviously, it would be a waste of a cycle if you ovulated yourself before we were able to harvest them. So you're taking two injections a day, usually at the same time, it's recommended they're taken in the evening but the time is not vital, it doesn't need to be on the same hour every day, but in the evenings on a regular basis. From that point on, you'll probably probably have one or two or three blood tests and ultrasound scans, transvaginal ultrasound scans, to watch the follicles growing and to measure the hormones that are being produced by those follicles.

Then the specialist will see those results on a daily basis and make decisions about whether to change the dosage of the drugs that you're using, or to make that final decision of it's time. It's time to collect the eggs. At that point, time is then set for the egg collection to take place.

When the eggs are ready for collection, they need a final maturing injection, an injection that makes the eggs go from 46 chromosomes to It's what happens in nature, just before ovulation, so that your 23 chromosomes can meet up with the 23 chromosomes of the sperm, and that requires a trigger injection, it's called. These days we use a synthetic version of the pregnancy hormone hCG, but we also can use hCG itself.

And that is given quite precisely, and you will be told by your nurses to be precise about taking that, 'cause once we give the injection, we know the eggs are gonna be released at about 40 hours after that.

So what we're doing is timing your egg collection to be between 36 and 38 hours after the injection is given. So if we've set a time, say tomorrow morning, eight o'clock in the morning to do the egg collection, you will have had your injection at eight o'clock last night. Once you have had that injection, then as I say, you're gonna be coming to the egg collection room 36 to 38 hours later, eggs are collected, then we begin what is called luteal phase support. In every IVF cycle, to make sure the lining of the womb is good, we need to keep progesterone levels high, and that's done either with pessaries or tablets in the vagina.

That's fairly uniform throughout cycles. You can use hCG injections instead of the progesterone pessaries, but that has a risk of causing hyperstimulation, so we rarely use it. So that's the short protocol. I'll just run it again. Starts on day two, daily injections, starting on day five, another set of injections, the trigger injection, egg collection, and then luteal phase support.

That's the majority. That came to pass about a decade ago in Australia. It's called a long down-reg protocol. That begins in the third week of the cycle before the cycle that we're going to collect the eggs. So 21 days on a normal cycle, we will do a blood test to make sure you've ovulated, and after that, we will be giving you either a nasal spray or an injection to switch off the ovaries, so that when we get to the day of your period, the ovaries are quiet, there's no activity, and then we start the daily injections of the FSH.

Again, those injections will continue all the way through until the day of the trigger injection. That's about, usually, an average of 11 days of injections. Could be 10, could be up to 14, but the average is around 11 days. Same injection as we talked about in the short protocol at that point, but we've already switched off your pituitary gland with a nasal spray or the downregulation agonist injections.

Again, there'll be the same monitoring with bloods and ultrasounds, and a decision will be made by your specialists that it's time to collect the eggs and the trigger will be provided. Again, it's the same trigger, 36 hours before the operation, to collect your eggs.

The luteal phase support, again, is identical to a short protocol. There are other protocols. Some people would do natural cycles where you only get one egg and you don't need any medication. In some countries around the world, Japan's one of them, where the drugs aren't covered by Medicare, natural cycles are done a lot, but it means you need to have lots of cycles to get the same cumulative pregnancy rate as we get in Australia, so it's usually not the way to go.

Some people will start the injections later to get one or two eggs only. Again, it's a numbers game. The more eggs you have, the more chance ultimately you have of getting pregnant.

In some cases, we even go as far as the long, long downregulation. So we started on day one of a cycle, not in the cycle that you're gonna be having the egg collection, but a month later. Some people do that where there's endometriosis, for instance. It may suppress endometriosis, although in a month, it's unlikely to.

So there are multiple protocols. The majority are pretty straightforward, short protocols that, as I said earlier, are much, much easier and much less burdensome than in the past. So when you sit down in front of your IVF doctor, that's what they'll probably give you, at least as your first cycle. The dosing of those is dependent on your clinical situation, age, weight and previous history. I'm not gonna go into that today but it will vary from patient to patient, so don't necessarily compare my cycle with your cycle.

It can lead to confusion. What you want is a specialist who understands what the best is for you, someone who's experienced, and our doctors at IVF Australia are all in that category.

So thanks for watching, I hope that was useful, and if you've got any questions or comments, please make them, and please subscribe to the Fertile Minds. Hi there, welcome to Fertile Minds. I'm Dr. Today, I'm going to be explaining how you can prepare yourself for the embryo transfer procedure.

As it is a very important day in your IVF treatment. Now let's get straight into it. So let's talk about how it is done. The embryo transfer procedure is a very straightforward simple procedure. Despite the fact that IVF treatment involves so much technology and is so complicated.

So in embryo transfer procedure, we put the embryo back into the uterus using a very fine catheter, trans-vaginally via the cervix, and then into the middle of the uterus.

We also use a transabdominal ultrasound to improve the accuracy of the transfer. That is why we ask you to come with a half filled bladder because that will help us in visualising the uterus on the ultrasound.

Of course, before we get to that point, there's a lot of identification process that goes on because we want to make sure the right embryo goes back to the right patient, right? So we ask you to bring a photo ID to help with that process. And then the first step of checking happens at the desk when you first check in with the office staff, and then secondly it will happen in the embryo transfer room with the doctor and the embryologist. And then finally, you will be able to do the ID check on the embryo dish together with your doctor and the scientists via the TV monitor.

On the TV monitor, you will also be able to see your embryo being magnified as seen from the embryologist's perspective using the microscope. So that's a part that the patients all love, it's really cool to be able to see your embryo. And then from there on you will be to see the process happening via the ultrasound. So you can see that this is a very straightforward procedure and it takes about five minutes.

There's no pain and there's no need for anaesthetics. And of course, when you're finished and leave the transfer room, you feel like you were abandoned and you abandoned for the next 10 to 12 days waiting for the pregnancy test result.

So I just want to give you some pointers about what to do. Now firstly, it's very important whenever your doctor and your fertility nurse have advised you to use any medication they ask you to use, keep using them, don't forget.

Secondly, keep calm and then the third thing is to help yourself doing that, try and keep yourself busy with projects around the house, keep yourself busy with your work, whatever it is to take your mind off your cycle. So you don't keep thinking it and you don't keep overthinking it. And then another very important thing is don't do your home pregnancy test because sometimes the medication we give you can give your erroneous readings.

So just wait calmly until the scheduled day of the pregnancy test at the clinic.