Traditional IVF or ICSI?

[Thea114]

I just did my first fresh IVF cycle with ICSI. Had 12 embryos retrieval, but ended with none for freezing and only one for embryo transfer, and a BFN. Have read some literature online that ICSI does not necessarily help, and am thinking of going to private to try one round of traditional instead. Has anyone had positive results with traditional and ICSI not quite being suitable?

[Ivfgotadream]

I’m sorry your cycle didn’t work outI had terrible ICSI fertilisation rates with my short protocol cycles and asked my clinic about doing a cycle without it. They weren’t overly keen and said to persevere with it - had I for high egg numbers they said it would have been possible to do 50/50 as a back up - so do ICSI on half of them and traditional on the other half but in the end we decided to change to natural modified IVF with ICSI and that made a huge difference to egg quality and fertilisation x

[Thea114 in reply to Ivfgotadream]

Thank you for sharing this with me! I didn’t know about natural modified Ivf and will ask my new clinic about this. x

[P2021]

Hi, so sorry to hear about your cycle. I had same experience in my first ICSI cycle with one embryo transfer and none for freezing. We were advised ICSI due to low sperm motility. So I think it would depend on semen analysis when choosing method and having low number of embryo would depend on quality of sperm and follicles rather than the method u chose (I think).

[Lisichka]

Hi Thea

Sorry to hear about the bfn.

We did one round natural and got good fertilization results (no baby though after 4 transfers). Then moved to the US, got a new clinic and they insisted on ICSI because apparently it’s standard practice here. We got even better fertilization rates with ICSI (19 out of 21). So yeah, I don’t know but I would think that if there are no issues with sperm, natural is fine.