Desire to have children Risks
Risks associated with fertility treatment
What can happen - I want to be informed!
In order to have successful fertility treatment, hormonal stimulation and therapy is usually required. This leads to follicle cell growth and in rare cases can lead to overstimulation. Overstimulation can occur alongside size increases of ovaries, fluid accumulation in the abdomen and stronger or milder pains in the lower abdomen. In rare cases one can experience shortness of breath or thrombosis. Overstimulation is very rare in cases of conventional fertility therapy (pure hormonal stimulation or semen transfer). It arises most often in cases of stimulation in preparation for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). If you should experience overstimulation, then you should always consult a gynaecologist for assessment. A further point of risk of the treatment is the emergence of a multiple pregnancy. Higher order multiple pregnancies (triplets or more children) are very rare, and may arise after conventional fertility treatment in <1% of all cases. After in vitro fertilisation they also occur less often now than they did previously, because in women under 40 years usually only 1-2 embryos are transferred. In women aged over 40, the individual possibility that all of the maximum three utilised embryos are nested is even less probable so that in their cases one can usually transfer also three embryos. A pregnancy of triplets carried to term in a woman aged over 40 hasn't occurred at Fertility Center Berlin for the past 7 years. Further risks, i. e. the growth of abscesses or bleeding after interventions like the vaginal follicle punction, are very rare and can arise with a probability of about 1:500. In children born via the ICSI method the probability of malformations can reach 9%. The German ICSI follow-up research study had compared 2800 children who were born after fertilisation with the ICSI method, with 2800 children selected at random. According to the study, the risk of the ICSI group for malformations lay at 9%, whereas for the randomly selected group such a risk was assessed at 7,2%. Thus one should take into account that the risk of malformations after ICSI is slightly elevated. We believe, however, that this risk is only elevated in a limited scope, and that it should not be considered a contraindication for fertility treatment. |
No successful treatment comes without risks - and it's the same with the fertility treatment. Risks arise primarily from the hormonal stimulation and its consequences.