Hello all,
I had 7 eggs collected ( which I was happy with at age 40) had the call this morning , only 3 fertilised. Just wondered if there’s anyway of telling if this is all egg quaility or sperm ? Husband low in every aspect so we do ICSI. Assuming it’ll be egg quality but wondered if anyone can add anything.
Never had any further investigations done with sperm, never been offered anything. Xx
hi in my last round I had 6 mature eggs of which 2 fertilised, I asked the embryologist if they could say why the rest didn’t , if it was egg issues or sperm , but there wasn’t any clear answers , nothing they could say for certain.
My partner has low sperm count so we also have Icsi & I was 37 at the time.
Sometimes they just can’t say why.
Hope the next steps go well best of luck X
Hi , thanks for replying.
How did you get on? Thank you… see how the next few days go thanks x
Those 2 embryos became day 5 blastocysts that I couldn’t believe made it , but had to freeze them due to lining issues , then had one transferred in January which was a negative , the second one didn’t survive the thaw process.
So not much luck for us. Waiting to start another full cycle.
Hope your 3 make it 🤞 x
Our embryologist said that usually first 3 days is up to egg quality and then lot of depends from sperm quality (that’s why sometimes there’s a lot of embryos that fail to develop from day 3 to day 5) but I was trying to find some info about that and didn’t find anything really confirmed so who knows really. I hope all 3 of them are doing great and they develop to beautiful embibabies 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻 good luck and remember- you only need one! 😘
That’s what my embryologist told me too. I’m 44 and had 16 eggs collected. 14 were mature, and 13 fertilised. Unfortunately, only 3 made it to Day 3, and one full blastocyst at Day 5 (which came back abnormal after PGT-A). The embryologist told me that my embryos were doing some crazy things in the first three days - which is a sign that there is something wrong with the egg side of things. Although I would have dearly loved to have blamed my sperm donor…
I’m surprised that my fertilisation rate was so high, given my egg quality was disastrously low. Something that I’m going to discuss with my consultant when I have my follow-up meeting in a few days.
Ask to speak to the embryologist & ask her to explain how your eggs look & what they are seeing at early cleavage stages. Are there any characteristics of the egg that might indicate poor quality & what about cleavage? These can be indicators of egg quality.
Are all 7 mature eggs? 3/7 fertilised is 43%, which is really great news. My understanding is that 1/3 (33%) fertilising is good.
In my case, I had a lot of immature eggs, my mature eggs had thickened zona pellucida, often a sign of poor quality. The thickened zona pellucida prevent sperm from penetrating so we had to do ICSI. Then after fertilisation with ICSI, the first cleavage was abnormal. The early the cleaving starts to be abnormal, the higher the odds of a lower quality embryo. My AMH was very low with a diagnoses of dimished ovarian reserve & I came to the conclusion after speaking with the embryologist that my eggs were poor quality. It was a hard realisation. We moved to donor & I have a beautiful 2 year old son & hoping to give him a brother or sister.
Our donor produced 16 amazing eggs when fertilised, we were left with 6 excellent quality 5-day blastocysts. So just to put that into perspective, it is 38% eggs fertilising from a young fertile lady with sperm that was healthy & rated excellent quality.
If you can handle it, don’t be afraid to ask questions. What do my eggs look like, are they all mature? any characteristics of quality that can indicate good or poor? What happens after fertilisation? Anything abnormal I need to know about? When they cleave, what is happening? Is this as expected? Are you seeing anything abnormal etc…
I’ll keep my fingers crossed, they’ll make it to day 5 xx
hi Bonaire, we had 13 eggs and zero fertilisation with icsi, was told it was an egg quality. We have paid for DNA frag and plc-zeta testing just incase xx best of luck xx
hey there. You can’t possibly know if it’s the sperm or the egg. ICSI takes out some of the natural occurrence of the process, so there’s bound to be less success than with ivf normal. They don’t know that the sperm they choose to marry with an egg is appropriate it’s a best guess based on the characteristics of each one. Focus on 3 fertilised, it just takes one and I have everything crossed for you.
Thanks everyone, some really useful things to consider and questions to ask my clinic.
Thanks for all your well wishes for our 3 little sprinkles ✨ 🙏🙏🙏 sending positive thought to them and all of you! Xx
hi lovely no real way of finding
Out if it’s sperm or egg issue. You’ve done amazingly well to get 7 and have 3 fertilise so far. I pray and hope they ge to a good stage of development. Even if you pgs test there’s no real way of knowing if it’s an egg or sperm issue as the absent or poor chromosomes could be from either parent or both. I would say if you’ve had icsi you have injected the sperm into the egg and it forces fertilisation. I have had very similar fertilisation and egg count. If it helps, I had 7 eggs and 3 got to Day 5 and were banked x
3 eggs collected
1 egg fertilised from 8 donor eggs which were collected 
16 eggs collected only one fertilised and transferred 
First cycle. Ahh - what now? Eggs collected - one fertilised
8 eggs collected 0 fertilised 
