How does more goes at IVF improve your chances

[sushee]

Pam,

There is a thread on the pros and cons of Blast Vs Day 2 transfer. I did do a lot of Day 2 transfers as I didn't get a lot of embryos at each cycle (around 6 on average) but after so many cycles, I wanted to know if they were making it past that magic Day 3 stage, so moved on to a blast transfer. If you do end up managing to get a blastocyst to transfer, your chances of success actually increase, not decrease. But getting to transfer is sometimes the difficult part as you risk your embryos not making it to Day 5.

Anyway have a read of that thread I've linked you to, it may answer some of your questions.

[butterfly_warrior]

I should probably post this in the other thread... but there's a 20% chance each cycle for a woman under 35 with a day 2-3 transfer. There's a 42% chance each cycle for a woman under 35 with a blastocyst transfer.

My clinic goes to blastocyst as standard procedure, as long as there are three or more embryos at day 3. But to give you some idea of how much drop off there is - I had 26 eggs collected, 21 were mature enough to use and 15 fertilised. We had 12 good embryos at day 3, but only 4 made it to blastocyst and were frozen. Due to bad OHSS I couldn't transfer then.

As for more goes at IVF increasing your chances - I could get into a mathematical discussion of the probabilities, but I won't. Using Sushee's example of rolling the dice - the more times you roll, the more chance there is of getting the 6. Not that the chance of getting a 6 is any different each time you roll, but if you stop rolling the dice it's not going to happen. I'll stop babbling about maths now.

BW