Fathers
and Infertility - With constant advances in medicine, there are more ways
that one to become a father. (6/6/03)
Egg
Regs - Thousands of women donate their eggs for infertile couples, but
eggs also hold the promise of cures for many diseases. Now as the demand for
eggs grows, women’s health advocates are already worrying about how
to protect egg donors. (11/26/02)
We've all seen the stories about twins, triplets and more born to women who
conceived with the help of fertility clinics. Such births are hard on both
the mother and the children. But as this ScienCentral news video reports,
doctors may have found a way to help parents have only one healthy baby.
Miracle Baby
Like many couples trying desperately to have a baby, Jodi Anderson and her
husband turned to modern medicine for help.
Jodi had gotten pregnant twice through artificial insemination, and miscarried
both times. “They were very early miscarriages, but, nonetheless, they
were very difficult,” she says. “And after the last one, we just
decided it was too much emotionally. I didn’t feel like I could go through
it again and wanted something that might make my chances a little better to
get pregnant.”
The Andersons decided to try in
vitro fertilization, a method of assisted reproduction in which the sperm
and the egg are combined in a laboratory dish. After fertilization occurs,
the resulting embryo is then transferred to the uterus where it may implant—or
attach—to the uterus. Implanted embryos are left to develop naturally.
But that process isn’t risk-free either. To increase the likelihood
of pregnancy, reproductive clinics normally transfer two or three embryos
to the mother’s womb, which can often lead to twins or triplets, and
also to premature births.
“Each additional pregnancy significantly increases the risk to the mother
and the baby,” explains Dr.
Eric Surrey, medical director of the Colorado
Center for Reproductive Medicine (CCRM). “Premature babies are not
just small babies, they are babies that can have problems with lung development,
with visual development, with mental retardation, cerebral palsy. Clearly
even a single pregnancy can result in premature delivery. However, the risks
increase dramatically. A twin pregnancy, for instance, results in a four-fold
greater incidence of [death during birth] than a single pregnancy. A triplet
pregnancy, a seven-fold greater incidence.”
In vitro fertilization.
Doctors at CCRM may have found a solution to this
problem—or technically, two solutions. They developed two
kinds of cultures in which to grow the embryos—one that mimics the
fallopian tube and is used for the first three days, and a second that mimics
the environment of the uterus and is used for the last two days. Then they
transfer the embryos into the mother’s uterus. These new solutions allow
them to grow the embryos in the lab for five days instead of the typical three
days.
Because these embryos, called blastocysts,
are a few days older, they are further along in their development. “[A
blastocyst] has about a hundred cells,” says David
Gardner, scientific director at CCRM, “and within those 100 cells,
you actually see the cells that are going to form the baby. These are the
embryos that we put back into the uterus, and they have a much, much higher
implantation rate than the early stage embryos.”
The doctors studied women who were all going through the in-vitro fertilization
process with their own eggs. “We were very pleasantly surprised to achieve
approximately 61 percent ongoing pregnancy rate with a single blastocyst being
transferred, as opposed to the higher but not dramatically higher 76 percent
pregnancy rate in those that had two blastocysts transferred,” says
Surrey.
In Jodi Anderson’s case, it was successful, and she gave birth to one
healthy baby, named Tyler. “It is amazing! We look at him all the time
and we cannot believe that he is ours,” says Anderson. “I know
that everybody loves when they have their children, and they can appreciate
it, but this is very different because to us and our family, he is a true
miracle baby.”
The doctors at CCRM say they have made the recipe for their complex new solution
public, so that other centers can also have access to this technology to help
their patients.
delicious
digg
magnolia
reddit
newsvine
netscape
netvibes
