29/07/2010

New test to predict success of IVF treatment developed at Stanford

Women who fail to become pregnant after undergoing in vitro fertilisation treatment often grapple with the decision of whether to try IVF again. It’s a difficult one to make: The procedure carries hefty financial, physical and emotional costs, and there are no guarantees it will work.

Now a team of Stanford University School of Medicine researchers has developed a model to predict the outcomes of a subsequent round of IVF for those women who have already gone through a cycle. The researchers found that their test, which relies on taking clinical data from prior, failed treatments to provide more personalised predictions, is 1,000 times more accurate than the age-based guidelines currently used to counsel patients.

"Our findings show that the first IVF cycle can provide quantitative, customised prediction of the live birth probability in a subsequent cycle," the researchers wrote in their paper. "This concept is radically different from the current paradigm, in which age is a major predictor."

The paper was led by Mylene Yao, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology. It follows previous work from Yao about another method she and her colleagues had devised that provides more accurate predictions about whether a woman undergoing IVF treatment will become pregnant. The newer test not only integrates more data into its methodology, but also its success was measured with a different outcome: live birth instead of pregnancy.

Yao said she’d like to see the new test widely available for clinical use, and she and co-author Wing Wong, PhD, professor of statistics and of health research and policy, have founded a company, Univfy, to develop and market prognostic tests to support clinical decision-making in infertility. Stanford holds the patent on this test.

Each year, close to 100,000 IVF cycles are performed using a woman’s fresh eggs, and around 29 percent of the treatments result in live births. Physicians typically use age-based data, with adjustments based on other clinical factors, to counsel patients on the probability of success. But given all the factors at play — including the number and quality of eggs and the total number of embryos implanted — age may be misleading as a prognostic factor.

Fonte: Stanford University