Advances in fertility treatment are offering new hope, particularly for women over 40 or those suffering from a failed in vitro fertilization (IVF), unexplained infertility, or repeated miscarriages.
Anna was 38 when she met her husband-to-be, John, and decided it was time to start a family.
After trying for almost two years with no success, she asked her doctor to refer her to a fertility specialist. “I’d always dreamed of being a mom and now I was afraid that at 40 my time had run out. After talking to Dr Beth Taylor at Olive Fertility Centre, I felt like there might be some hope,” said Anna. 
After in-depth fertility testing, Anna discovered that she wasn’t producing an egg every month. Testing also revealed that her husband had some fertility issues.
“Dr Taylor spent a long time with us discussing our fertility issues and what our treatment options were. We had a million and one questions and she explained everything to us very carefully.”
“A diagnosis of infertility (defined as the inability to get pregnant after one year of having unprotected sex) does not mean you can’t have a child,” explains Dr Taylor.
“There have been major advancements in the treatment of female and male infertility in the last few years and now the large majority of couples diagnosed with infertility will be able to get pregnant. In many cases the treatment is quite simple. But for couples that require a more high tech approach, our success with in vitro fertilization (IVF) has improved enormously.”
IVF involves removing a woman’s eggs, fertilizing them in a lab with her partner’s sperm, and then placing the embryo back in the woman’s uterus.
“Until recently we’ve only been able to judge the health of an embryo by its appearance,” says Dr Taylor. “While we’re able to get good success rates with this approach, many embryos that look normal don’t implant or the woman has a miscarriage because the embryo isn’t chromosomally normal.”
However, breakthrough technologies such as the EmbryoScope (pioneered in western Canada by Olive Fertility) and Comprehensive Chromosome Screening (a procedure that involves screening embryos for any chromosomal abnormalities to choose the healthiest embryo to put back into the mother’s uterus) are allowing fertility specialists to determine with much greater accuracy which embryos in IVF have the normal number of chromosomes and are the most likely to result in a successful pregnancy.
Until now the chances of a woman Anna’s age getting pregnant with IVF were less than 15% per cycle.
With CCS the success rate for IVF is 75% even in women over 40 if a chromosomally normal embryo is identified.
Due to Anna’s age and diagnosis, she and John decided to have CCS. They were lucky and one chromosomally healthy embryo was successfully transferred. 
“Even though CCS added about $4000 to the cost of the IVF, we feel it was so worth it. We’ve been able to just enjoy the pregnancy without worrying about a miscarriage and knowing that the baby is almost certainly free of any of the chromosome disorders like Down syndrome that are more common with older moms. And we have a couple of healthy frozen embryos for a future sibling.”
Olive Fertility Centre is one of Canada’s largest fertility clinics, offering an advanced IVF lab, personal care teams and innovative programs that include the EmbryoScope, comprehensive chromosome screening (CCS), egg freezing, and prenatal NIPT testing.
 For more information on Olive Fertility Centre go to  www.olivefertility.com.