One of the main reasons that a woman might consider In-Vitro Fertilization is because the eggs in her ovaries aren’t making it to where they need to make it in order to conceive. In some cases, it’s because a woman is older and her ovarian reserve – the number of eggs still in the woman’s ovaries – is depleting. Egg production is based on that number, and whether or not a woman responds well to medication therapies has a lot to do with ovarian reserve.

There are many factors involved in a woman’s ovarian reserve. Age, as you probably know, is one of the most significant factors. Over the course of a lifetime, a woman’s ovaries release many eggs – one during each ovulation. When that happens, the egg isn’t replaced and so she’s really looking at a finite number of eggs to begin with.

The IVF process involves giving the patient fertility medications to help with ovulation. What these medications do, in some cases, is to help to stimulate the ovaries. The ovaries don’t create more eggs, of course, but they can be coaxed into releasing an egg. Ideally, the medications will actually cause several eggs to be released.

If your ovarian reserve is high, a specific dose of medication might product 15 or 20 eggs that can be used in IVF. The same dose might make only 6 or 8 eggs in a woman with a lower ovarian reserve.

One of the most difficult tasks of a fertility clinic that wants to do IVF is to stimulate the ovaries to get a response. They need to produce those eggs so that they can be fertilized. In some cases, it has to do with the medications or procedures used, but in other cases it may just have more to do with how cooperative a woman’s body is being.

There’s one other thing to keep in mind here. The body does it’s own thing, how it wants to. A woman with a low ovarian reserve may produce more eggs than a woman with a higher reserve, because the body has many internal factors that influence how many eggs are released as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 and is filed under Fertility.