ICSI - Is it your key to IVF success?

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like having your own fertility5-10% of couple doing IVF will fail fertilization. If you are thinking about doing IVF, you better learn about ICSI and ask your doctor about it. It could hold they key to your IVF success.



ICSI stands for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Its actually a very simple process. You should know that during IVF, eggs are removed from a woman’s ovaries and are fertilized outside the body in a laboratory. Instead of putting hundreds of thousands of sperm outside an egg and hoping that one sperm will be able to fertilize it, #ICSI uses one sperm and injects it directly inside the egg. The stuff inside an egg is called the cytoplasm so ICSI stands for intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection.



Why was ICSI a revolution for IVF? Well many couples with infertility have sperm problems. Sometimes the sperm number are low, other times the movement of sperm is poor or the sperm are shaped abnormally. Before ICSI, couples with these problems frequently had failure of their eggs to fertilize. The couples with severe male problems were considered poor candidates for IVF and had low pregnancy rates.



ICSI changed all that. Now couples who were considered poor candidates were all of a sudden great candidates for IVF. In fact, the worse the sperm problems were, the higher the couples chance for pregnancy using ICSI!



So which couples being treated with IVF should have ICSI?  One group of patients that all doctors would agree should have ICSI is couples with men who have an abnormal semen analysis. No controversy there. Also, couples who need to do genetic testing on their embryos, need to do ICSI to prevent the DNA from extra sperm from messing up the results.



But what about men who have a normal semen analysis? Well, as it turns out, studies have shown that men with a normal semen analysis may still fail to fertilize eggs in IVF 5-10% of the time. That’s not a high percentage but if you are that 1 in 10 couples who goes through an IVF cycle and then finds out that none of your eggs fertilized because of some undetected problem with sperm, it can be pretty devastating.



So I agree with the group of doctors who recommends ICSI for all couples doing IVF whether they have an abnormal semen analysis or not. But not all doctors agree with this approach.



By the way, ICSI doesn’t increase the chance for a pregnancy to occur over the older methods of fertilization. It just reduces the chances of fertilization failure so that a couple will have embryos to use to attempt pregnancy.



Infertility TV is your weekly source for the best medical information if you have infertility, recurrent miscarriage or are just trying to conceive. (TTC). InfertilityTV covers infertility testing, fertility treatments such as Clomid, Follistim and Crinone and fertility treatments like IUI and IVF (in vitro fertilization)



One of the most popular playlists on InfertilityTV are the TTC tips which are great even you are not struggling with infertility



Dr Morris is a practicing IVF and infertility expert who sees patients at IVF! located in the Naperville Fertility Center.



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