PGT-A Testing

[Catz22]

Hi,

I had my egg retrieval on Monday and am doing a freeze all cycle. There have been 8 eggs fertilised and will know how many get to blastocyst stage by Saturday. I was wondering how people feel about the PGTA testing? From what I've read it doesn't necessarily increase chances given my age (I'm 37). I was pregnant naturally last year and had a miscarriage after 8 weeks - I know that doesn't mean it's 'recurrent' but it made me nervous about having one again. Any thoughts would be welcome!

Thanks

[AdviceforJane]

Hi, I had an egg retrieval in May with 8 eggs fertilised too! I am 37 as well and had two natural miscarriages last year so some similarities. We had 5 day 5 blastocysts and decided to transfer one fresh and test the other four.

The fresh transfer didn't work. Of the other 4, 2 came back euploid, one low-level mosaic that was suitable for transfer and 1 aneuploid.

We have since transferred one of the euploids and it failed.

I am glad we tested the ones we did and in fact I wish we had tested the one that we transferred fresh. Now we don't know why it failed. If we knew it was an euploid that failed that would suggest there is another issue going on somewhere and it isn't just bad luck. As it is we only know for sure that one euploid has failed which might just be bad luck.

But all these decisions are really hard. I have second guessed myself a lot along this journey but you can only make decisions knowing what you know at the time. At every stage we have made decisions that would have worked out for 60-70% of people, and at every stage we have ended up in the unlucky 30-40%. That is frustrating but it doesn't mean those decisions were wrong.

I know there are some debates online about whether PGT-A testing is accurate. I felt happy given what I had read that the newer style of testing offered by most clinics is accurate enough. Perhaps if I had got no euploids back I might have felt differently, I don't know. There is one big study showing that if you have 3 euploid embryos you have 95% chance of live birth. There is another one showing that overall PGT-A testing doesn't lead to more live births or quicker time to live birth and the HFEA don't recommend it on that account. At my clinic, they said that the pregnancy / live birth rate jumps from about 30-40% without it to 60-70% with it. It also does seem to eliminate a lot of the issues to do with age. Having had the two miscarriages and being a bit older it felt like the right choice for me.

Good luck whatever you decide.

[Catz22 in reply to AdviceforJane]

Thank you for sharing this with me and your thinking behind it. Best of luck

[Ranchu90 in reply to AdviceforJane]

Your reply is absolutely brilliant and I agree 100% without changing a word 😁. We been successful with 2 PGS tested embryos as we have now twins. My clinic has 91% success rate with pgta tested embryos. I had 3 chemicals in the past so definitely wanted to know if my embryos were viable. Bear in mind that previous 3 cycle we produced one single embryo but I was determined to test anyway even if it was just 1. We been lucky enough to get 4 blasts on cycle 4 so we tested 5 in total. 3 normal, 1 mosaic and 1 abnormal age 30.

[Kittykat198]

I think it depends on your circumstance diagnosis etc. I got less blasts so decided against pgta. We also don’t have much more money after the package we have so it isn’t worth the money because I can’t pay for another 3 rounds if this fails. If I had 5-10 blasts then I would consider it. Best of luck

[Catz22 in reply to Kittykat198]

Thanks for letting me know. All the best to you too.

[Millbanks]

I agree with Kittykat198 - it really depends on your circumstances.

We had 9 blasts so decided on PGT-A because we had already done 5 transfers with 9 embryos and didn’t want to transfer again without knowing that the embryo was viable.

There were a lot more pieces of the puzzle for us to finally have a BFP but this just meant that we didn’t have to do another 9 transfers to find a “good” embryo. If that makes sense xx

[Catz22 in reply to Millbanks]

Yes makes sense, thanks for letting me know

[Gerti2020]

Hi, congrats on number of eggs fertilised. I had 3 fertilised on my last round- no testing. 1 was successful and the other 2 failed - that was >£6k gone for the two FETs. This time round I had 6 embryos, 1 I did a fresh transfer last Monday and the other 5 have been sent off f for testing.my reasoning for the testing Is I would rather not spend another £15k (and go through the pain) for frozen embryo transfers if they are destined to fail. It seems to be pot luck if they are good or not in my case. I think it depends on your age as well of course. There’s more chance of failure with me as I’m 42 even though I was very lucky at 40yrs with my first successful transfer. Wish you so much luck x