Tag: fertility

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Active Lifestyle Leading Up To IVF Treatment Makes Women Far More Likely To Conceive

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Gardening, doing the housework or going for brisk walks can treble IVF success, according to researchers. Women who led active lifestyles in the year leading up to their treatment were far more likely to conceive. Scientists have been divided about whether exercise helps or hinders the chances of pregnancy, either naturally or with IVF.

While some studies have found that physical activity reduces fertility, others have found it improves it – or makes no difference.

Now scientists have found that women who do the housework, go for brisk walks or take other ‘moderate’ forms of exercise are three times more likely to conceive than those who spend most of the day sitting down.

The lifestyles of 87 women undergoing IVF were compared in the year leading up to their treatment. Read full article.

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We Need to Talk About Our Eggs

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WHEN I recently mentioned to a pregnant acquaintance that I was writing a book about egg freezing (and had frozen my own eggs in hopes of preserving my ability to have children well into my 40s), she replied, “You’re so lucky. I wish I had known to freeze my eggs.”

She was 40 years old and wanted two children, so she and her husband were planning to start trying to conceive a second child shortly after the birth of their first. “Now everything is a rush,” she said. Married at 38, she didn’t think to talk to her obstetrician-gynecologist about fertility before then. If her doctor had brought up the subject, she said, she might have put away some eggs when she was younger. Read full article.

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Fertility Preservation for Cancer Patients: Demographic Disparities in Counseling and Financial Concerns Are Barriers to Utilization

ASRM News and Research

Several teams of researchers will present new survey data covering the use of  fertility preservation for cancer patients at the Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

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Weight Loss Does Not Improve Fertility

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HERSHEY, Pa. — Losing weight does not lead to improved fertility in women, but does improve sexual function, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

“Obesity in women has been linked to lack of ovulation and thus infertility,” said Richard Legro, M.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “Obesity, especially centered in the abdomen, among infertile women seeking pregnancy is also associated with poor response to ovulation induction and with decreased pregnancy rates.”

Obese women are often told to lose weight prior to conception, so researchers looked at changes in reproductive function after gastric bypass surgery. One way to learn more about the effects of obesity on reproduction is to study women after bariatric surgery, since a large amount of weight is lost in a relatively short period of time. Each person can be studied while obese and after surgery to detect changes. Researchers report their findings in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Researchers followed 29 morbidly obese women — women whose body fat accumulated to the extent that it may have an adverse effect on health — of reproductive age for up to two years after Roux en Y gastric bariatric bypass surgery. Roux en Y is a procedure that creates a small pouch in the stomach that is directly connected to the midsection of the small intestine, bypassing the rest of the stomach and the upper portion of the small intestine. Read full article.

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‘Missing’ protein can kick-start male fertility

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Adding a missing protein to in fertile human sperm can ‘kick-start’ its ability to fertilise an egg and dramatically increase the chances of a successful pregnancy, a new study has claimed.

Researchers from Cardiff University have found that sperm transfers a vital protein, known as PLC-zeta (PLCz), to the egg upon fertilisation.

This sperm protein initiates a process called ‘egg activation’ which sets off all the biological processes necessary for development of an embryo. Read full article.

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Cell Death Discovery Suggests New Ways to Protect Female Fertility

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Melbourne researchers have identified a new way of protecting female fertility, offering hope to women whose fertility may be compromised by the side-effects of cancer therapy or by premature menopause.

The researchers, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Monash University and Prince Henry’s Institute of Medical Research, made the discovery while investigating how egg cells die.

They found that two specific proteins, called PUMA and NOXA, cause the death of egg cells in the ovaries. The finding may lead to new strategies that protect women’s fertility by blocking the activity of these two proteins. Read full article.

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Super-fertility offers clue to recurrent miscarriage

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“Super-fertility” may explain why some women have multiple miscarriages, according to a team of doctors.

They say the wombs of some women are too good at letting embryos implant, even those of poor quality which should be rejected.

The UK-Dutch study published in the journal PLoS ONE said the resulting pregnancies would then fail.

One expert welcomed the findings and hoped a test could be developed for identifying the condition in women.

Recurrent miscarriages – losing three or more pregnancies in a row – affect one in 100 women in the UK. Read full article.

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A Pack of Walnuts a Day Keeps the Fertility Specialist Away?

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Aug. 15 in Biology of Reproduction‘s Papers-in-Press reveals that eating 75 grams of walnuts a day improves the vitality, motility, and morphology of sperm in healthy men aged 21 to 35.

Approximately 70 million couples experience subfertility or infertility worldwide, with 30 to 50 percent of these cases attributable to the male partner. Some studies have suggested that human semen quality has declined in industrialized nations, possibly due to pollution, poor lifestyle habits, and/or an increasingly Western-style diet.

Dr. Wendie Robbins and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles decided to investigate whether increasing polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which are critical for sperm maturation and membrane function, would increase sperm quality in men consuming a Western-style diet.

The best sources of dietary PUFAs in a Western-style diet include fish and fish oil supplements, flax seed, and walnuts, the latter of which are rich sources of α-linolenic acid (ALA), a natural plant source of omega-3. Read full article.