Immature Eggs

[Lionfish]

If you have immature eggs in your IVF cycle does this mean that in a natural cycle they are likely to be immature? Does this explain my inability to be able to concieve?
Anyone got any suggestions on what a good treatment might be for immature eggs?? Any experiences with this diagnosis or any successes?
Was hoping for a natural treatment if poss but am still in the IVF process.
TIA

[briggsy's girl]

hiya hun

i'm pretty sure that the immature eggs at EPU are more common in IVF than in natural cycles - in a natural cycle, your body "waits" to ovulate until the eggs are ready - but in IVF your body is forced to produce masses of follicles - and not all develop at the same rate - unfortunately they have to trigger when the larger "dominant" follicles are at the prime size - so some of the others that might have benefitted from an extra day or three of stims to ripen them up - they're the ones that are immature

unfortunately, it seems when you have a large follie count you end up with a few immature eggs - for me, i had 59 "dominant" follies (and lotsa little ones at scan) - 22 eggs collected - 11 were mature enough to attempt fertilisation - and only five fertilised....

[~BecD~]

Hi lionfish
I am currently going through In Vitro Maturation (IVM) where you have very little stimulation and EPU is done early on to retrieve the immature eggs. They are then matured in the laboratory and fertilised and grown as per IVF.
Currently I believe only my clinic (Fertility Specialists WA) is doing it as it is considered an innovative procedure, but there may be other places that are considering it.
It's worth chatting to your FS about anyway :-)

[Acacia]

Hi Lionfish

I just thought I would let you know that in my first IVF/ICSI cycle I had 9 eggs collected but only 2 fertilised as most of them weren't mature enough. In my second cycle I had 10 eggs collected but that time 6 fertilised and they were better quality embryos than the first cycle.

The much better result on my second cycle was all due to a slight change in my dose of FSH (higher) and my FS let my follicles grow for an extra 2-3 days before OPU. Almost the same number of eggs, just completely different outcome as a lot less of them were immature eggs.

Our fertility issue is Male Factor (I've checked out fine), so I could pretty much say that I wouldn't expect to have an issue with my ovulation or eggs in my natural cycle. In any case, as BG has mentioned, your body regulates this so much better in a natural cycle than an artificial IVF cycle. If you're ovulating, you body won't trigger naturally to release an egg until it has reached the right point of maturity.

A big part of getting it to work in the artificial IVF environment so you get lots of mature eggs for OPU is trying to get as many of your follicles as possible (without hyperstimulating, of course) all maturing at the same time i.e. follicles stimulated at the same time, growing at the same rate and roughly the same size. This is the tricky bit, but I'm sure your FS has learnt huge amounts about your body from this cycle that you have gone through so that next time if or when you are going through another stimulation cycle they will be able to tailor it to you more and get as many equally matured eggs.

Hope this help, hun.

Miss C