DE transfer - 60% success rate?

[louisear]

evening all. Hope everyone is doing ok at this (stressful) time of year. Having ruled out IVF with own eggs and adoption, the only option left to consider is doner eggs at a cost of a huge £7500! I didn't get to ask all my questions at the appointment today but with such s lot of money at stake, just wondered if anyone knew the reasons for why a DE transfer wouldn't be successful. All my tests have come back fine and the consultant said my 3 mc have probably been due to poor egg quality. He also wouldn't entertain the idea of any possibility it could be a sperm issue and if we had DE transfer we'd be using OH's sperm. Any advice would be appreciated xx

[Lizzielizzielizzie]

Whilst he has ruled out sperm issues, if you haven’t had karotyping then there is a (very slim) chance that your husband carries a chromosome translocation (1 in 500 people) and this could cause a DE to fail - my husband has this but until we insisted on the karotyping they thought it was highly probable it was my egg quality. Also if you haven’t had a sperm fragmentation test then this could show up “hidden” sperm issues.

However, I imagine most DE failures are due to abnormal eggs- a percentage of women’s eggs are abnormal no matter what age the donor is- this percentage just gets higher as we get older. So, younger eggs= a better chance xx

[Sprinkles86]

Seems strange how they just assume it’s a problem with the eggs.... with you spending out that much money I’d definitely look into getting the ‘sperm comet’ test. It’s about £300 I think and is what Lizzie describes below, the fragmentation test. This would at least rule that out before you go ahead... I don’t know much about donor egg cycles but wanted to pass on my best wishes, I hope it all goes smoothly for you xxxxx

[Hidden]

Our first DE cycle failed despite it being a ‘perfect’ hatching 5AA blastocyst, I got my bfp on my 2nd try (fet) I think some of it is down to look but was also abit shocked as you just presume DE will work first try xx

[Hidden]

DE... isn’t guaranteed but it is a higher rate we have had 3 separate cycles 1 x BFP 2 x BFN

1st BFP ever since starting this journey but we lost him at 17 weeks.... we done it abroad cheaper x

[Blondyboo]

our first donor egg was a chemical pregnancy. 2nd was a BFN. 3rd im currently 12 weeks today. What we believe was the problem was my womb lining was too thick. before the 3rd cycle I had a hysteroscopy with implant ion cuts to get down to the good blood supply and we think this helped us get our BFP (thats what the consultant said) x

[Coracle]

Hi. Even with everything being 'perfect' the best you can hope for is about 60% each transfer. I think it's really important to think ahead and budget if the money is a big issue.

Consider access fertility, a finance/insurance company who only work with Manchester at the moment. You pay £16,500, but this includes up to 3 fresh donor cycles, all the drug costs, and all the potential fet's from those cycles. You keep all eggs from each donor cycle, but they guarantee a minimum of 6 eggs, or it 'does not count'. If you do not at the end of the day, have a live baby, then 70% of cost is returned to you. However, if you have a baby on the very first try, then that's the end of your treatment. Before starting the above, you do have to pay about £1000 for pre treatment assessments for both partners, but this includes sperm comet test.

I hear some London clinics may now be offering similar to the above.

Alternative, is to consider abroad. I think yourivfjourney.com also offers similar package to access fertility, but with Czech clinic.

I say all this because things go wrong. I hadn't heard of access fertility, and went with a London clinic with one of the best success rates. Very expensive frozen egg donor cycle. Started with 15 frozen eggs, which we hoped would give us one good blast, and two or more for the freezer. Ended up with nothing on day 5, and two very intermediate blasts on day 6, and nothing to freeze. Unsurprisingly BFN.

We want to stay in UK so are now going w access fertility. Personally, I think you have to consider you may need 3 or 4 transfers to succeed.

Best wishes in all your research and considerations xx

[Coracle]

Also just remembered something else you had asked about, re miscarriages being egg quality or sperm.

I checked out your age, and see like me you are early 40s. I am a GP as well as a patient. I'm really sorry to say Louise, but with my GP hat on, I would say hugely more likely to be egg quality causing miscarriages than sperm. Sadly, miscarriages in 40+ year olds are common. Full on male karyotyping is expensive I think, sperm comet test not so much.

[Caroliono4]

I was convinced that it was my eggs that are the reason for my recurrent miscarriages but we had the dna sperm comet and found my husband has high fragmentation. We are going to try OE ICSI in Feb and if that fails move on to DE. I think it's worth checking out his sperm just in case as it could effect the outcome with DE.

[Cyantist]

Is embryo donation an option? I know there's no known sperm issue but it doesn't mean there's not one. As far as I'm aware they don't charge the same for embryos as eggs.

I know there's the disadvantage that the child isn't biologically related to either parent, but there are a number of advantages to using donor embryos rather than eggs

[Cinderella5]

I turned to DE on advice on our NHS treatments. We got told I had poor egg quality due to my age (just turned 40) although I was bit annoyed as there is no test to prove this, its just an educated guess! I was worried going forward that perhaps we would do DE, pay all that money and find out that it was my hubbys sperm (he las very low count and this was originally the reason for ICSI) and be no better off. We decided to go abroad for costs reasons (cheaper abroad) and sent all my previous cycles notes and they agreed that failure was probably due to my poor eggs. We actually did really well, our 27 yr old donor got us 10 eggs, 8 fertilised and we got 6 blastocysts.....that was definitley evidence that it was my eggs and nothing to do with sperm, in fact the clinic commented it was super sperm so that was him proud. Unfortunately our first cycle didnt work and we transferred 2 top quality hatching blastocysts. The consultant was very surprised that it hadnt worked as apparently everything was perfect so its maybe just bad luck. Im now having a few other tests along with dilation of the cervix and hysteroscopy to rule anything rule for lack of implantation - Ive never been pregnant. The odds are greatly improved for us, I was give a 5% chance if trying again (by my NHS clinic) with my OE and my clinic did have great rates (around 75%) but obviously Im one of the unlucky ones.xx