In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a money-, time-, and dignity- gobbling exercise. Nobody would bother with it, except that it can result in a whole new human being, and how could you put a price on that? (Well, apart from the $12,400 per cycle that the American Society for Reproductive Medicine estimates it costs)
The chances of a baby arriving, are decreased by the mom’s more advanced age, the length of the infertility and the use of the woman’s own eggs, but increased by a previous successful IVF-generated birth and use of ICSI.
Before even thinking about IVF, however, potential parents might try a simple new program or iPhone app developed by British researchers which may predict with new levels of accuracy their chances of success.
Parents who use the app could also be helping the cause of science. IVFpredict.com asks nine questions and then calculates the odds of IVF leading to a baby. The questions range from the low tech, like the mother’s age and how many pregnancies or rounds of IVF she’s had before and whether her eggs or someone else’s are being used, to the technical, like what type of medicine will be used and whether the egg will be fertilized using intracytoplasmic sperm injection or ICSI (a single sperm injected directly into an egg.)
The folks who devised the test, created the model after analyzing data on 144,018 IVF cycles from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in Britain
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