A Nod is As Good As a Wink to a Blind Horse

DVIF&G February 2019

In Vitro fertilization (IVF) is offered to couples that undergo infertility treatment when all the other measures to achieve pregnancy fail. The success of IVF, as a treatment modality, has gradually improved over the last 4 decades, due to scientific and technological advances. Nonetheless the resulting pregnancy rate has been modest and seems to have plateaued in the recent past. So additional steps have been taken to improve these results.

One of them is Preimplantation Genetic Screening (PGS), a technique that requires biopsy of the resulting embryos and assessment of the embryos chromosomal complement, in other words if all the chromosomes are present and intact. This procedure will eliminate any embryos that under the microscope look normal but they have an abnormality, such as a Down syndrome. Even after this step, the transfer of a chromosomally normal embryo does not guaranteed a pregnancy and in the instance that a pregnancy occurs a miscarriage could …

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