Good news! Women who are still having a hard time conceiving should not get frustrated in case fertility treatment fails to work. A new research found out that at the age of forty, 1 out of 3 women still has the chance of becoming mothers even after IVF failure.
"Actually even at the age of 40 your chances of getting pregnant spontaneously are pretty good if you keep trying, and it's really not until you're 45 there is a really sharp turn off," said Lord Robert Winston, who heads the Genesis Research Trust in London and Britain's leading fertility expert as cited on Daily Mail.
A number of couples claim anecdotally that their wives unexpectedly become pregnant right after abandoning the hope of having children. However, evidence to suggest that their claim is true remains unfounded.
Six years following their fertility treatment, 403 couples were followed up by scientists at Greenwich NHS Trust, Imperial College and King's College London. 96 of these couples apparently failed to conceive, believing they could never have children. But 3 in 10 actually became pregnant naturally within the coming years as cited on Telegraph.
"Regardless of the outcome of fertility treatments - whether the patients conceived or not - there is about a 30 per cent likelihood of conceiving over a six-year period," Dr Samuel Marcus said. Marcus is the lead author, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, London.
According to Dr Marcus, there is not really a simple explanation for spontaneous conception after long-standing sub-fertility. He further said that as fertility treatments have become prevalent, IVF methods are more and more used for less prolonged infertility as well as for less severe cases, including unexplained infertility, mild male sub-fertility and mild endometriosis.
The authors of the said study learned that 87% of the spontaneous conceptions came about within 2 years of finishing the IVF treatments. Surprisingly, 31% of women who had failed to conceive through IVF method still had children naturally. What's even more surprising is the fact that about a quarter of women who successfully had children through fertility treatment even had more children without the need for IVF.
"This is really useful information that doctors can use to counsel patients about their chances of pregnancy after undergoing assisted conception," said Prof Allan Pacey, the editor-in-chief of the journal Human Fertility where the study was published. "It certainly suggests that there remains a reasonable chance of spontaneous pregnancy after fertility treatment has been attempted," he added.
