First Time IVF Success: The surprising facts about low dose aspirin

Today’s video is about the use of low dose aspirin to help with IVF success. Should you take a low dose aspirin every day to increase your chance for first time IVF success.



Why aspirin you ask? Isn’t heparin for headaches? Actually, aspirin has a lot of different effects. At standard doses, it can help reduce the pain of headaches and is also effective for reducing fevers. In low doses, aspirin can also reduce the risk for blood clots and improve circulation in the tiniest blood vessels.



Specifically, low dose aspirin has been found, in various studies, to improve blood flow to the ovaries during the use of fertility medications and improve the thickness of the uterine lining which could help with implantation.



But, does the use of low dose aspirin actually get more couples pregnant and more couples to deliver a baby.



A number of studies have been published which have tried to answer this question. The results have been mixed. This means that some studies showed a benefit to using low dose aspirin and some studies found no benefit.



This happens fairly often in medicine where studies reach different conclusions. One way to figure out what is going on is to combine all of the smaller studies into one very big study. This is called a meta-analysis. Think of it this way, doctors can be more confident about the results of a study if you have 1,000 patients compared to say 100. Meta-analyses can also weed out studies that were not of very good quality.



So what’s the bottom line? In 2017, a meta-analysis of 13 studies which included over 3000 women was published. Compared to women who didn’t receive any, women given low dose aspirin during their IVF cycle had the same number of eggs retrieved, the same fertilization rate, the same uterine lining thickness, the same percentage of embryos implanted and the same delivery rate.



So the bottom line is this. Low dose aspirin is unlikely to improve your chances for IVF success or if it does, the effect is probably really small. So why do doctors still recommend low dose aspirin? WEll, the data didn’t show any harm to using low dose aspirin. In addition, it is inexpensive and doesn’t have any significant side effects. The hope is that there might be some rare patients that might still benefit.