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By Colette Bouchez
If you're over 35 and especially if you are over 40 and still thinking about getting pregnant ... well you have both my congratulations and my sympathy! While the world of reproductive medicine has certainly made pregnancy after age 40 a viable possibility, I have to hand it to any woman willing to take on the "terrible twos" and peri menopause in the same decade!
But for those of you who do want to take the "older mom" plunge, I want to tell you about a very exciting advance in the world of reproductive medicine. It's called GREEN IVF - a kinder, gentler, much more natural way of performing the traditional in vitro fertilization ( IVF) procedure that appears to be having some amazing results!
Indeed, among the most popular of all fertility treatments worldwide involves the process known as IVF or in vitro fertilization. While there are many different varieties of IVF and varying techniques that are used, the basic premise remains the same: To allow fertilization to take place outside the body in an environment that is medically created to optimize the chance for conception.
GREEN IVF is based on the same premise, with one very important twist - it leaves out one step! And that omission could be what turns your fertility odds completely around! Intrigued? I thought you might be !
GREEN IVF: What It Is & How It Works
From almost the time IVF began - the first birth took place in 1978 - one of the key factors allowing this procedure to work as well as it has, is the use of fertility drugs . These are medications designed to encourage the growth and development of multiple eggs while also allowing doctors to manipulate your hormones and in a sense “take control” of your fertility cycle.
The result: Instead of making and ovulating just one egg, a woman can make many eggs; instead of pregnancy occurring from one embryo, multiple eggs are combined with lots of sperm resulting in multiple embryos. Instead of just one fertilized embryo making it’s way to a woman’s uterus, multiple embryos are transferred into her body. All of this increases the chance for pregnancy.
And for many couples these, and medications like them, become the deciding factor that allows conception to occur.
That said, the use of these medications are not without problems – including not only an increase in multiple births, but also many side effects – including the potential to increase woman's risk for certain cancers later in life. Moreover hte use of fertility drugs can add thousands and sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of each IVF procedure.
Enter: GREEN IVF! Indeed, as all of these issues came together, a group of brilliant new fertility pioneers began to look for what might be a better way to combine science and nature – one that does not involve the use of these medications. Their thought: The less that medicine interferes with nature, the better the outcome might be!The result of this thinking eventually led to the development of ‘GREEN IVF’ – a natural cycle fertility treatment that relies primarily on the workings of a woman’s own body to lay the groundwork for the IVF procedure.
So, instead of bombarding your body with medications designed to force your system to produce an abnormally large number of eggs in a given cycle, Green IVF allows your body to do what it does naturally – i.e., grow, mature, and develop just one egg, the “ right “ egg, the “best” egg for fertilization. That one egg is then harvested, combined with sperm, and the single resulting embryo is placed back into your uterus – in almost the exact same way it would be if your conception had occurred naturally inside your body.
Indeed, with natural cycle IVF we are going back to the future : One egg, one embryo and one baby at a time!
Now if this seems as if it would not work well for women over 35 - particularly since natural egg production slows down as a woman ages - ironically, studies show that Green IVF actually works even better on women who have not responded to the typical egg producing medications.
In one study published recently in the journal Fertility and Sterility, a group of reproductive experts from Rome, Italy found that in women who did not previously respond well to fertility drugs, natural cycle “GREEN IVF” was able to help them achieve a successful implantation at a rate nearly three
